


Terms of Service

by kres



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Consensual Violence, Dark, First Time, M/M, Post Reichenbach, Sexual Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-26
Updated: 2013-06-21
Packaged: 2017-12-12 23:58:11
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 14
Words: 51,410
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/817556
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kres/pseuds/kres
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John finds out from the telly.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Marble, Diamond, Stone

**Author's Note:**

> This story is an exploration of violence, in sexual and non-sexual context. There will be flavors of violence here that might be **severely uncomfortable for you**. They might be triggery. There will be BDSM **not** done right. If you've read my previous piece, you know I write uncomfortable sex. Well, I didn't get any fluffier with this one.
> 
> Throughout, I strived to maintain respect for the characters - I don't like playing with dolls for the sake of cheap thrills. Did I succeed? I hope I did. Please tell me if I didn't. This is a very important aspect to me, so if I screwed up, I want to know. I want to get better.
> 
> I think about this as companion piece to [End of the Story](http://archiveofourown.org/works/557052/chapters/993696), but in spirit rather than content. I've written one return fic, from Sherlock's POV, with full cast of characters, because I wanted to explore that part. This one is much more zoomed in, and deals almost exclusively with John and Sherlock, from John's POV. It feels like a companion, because it describes the same period of time - but different things happen. Severely different :)
> 
> Please proceed at your own risk, and enjoy.
> 
> Note: This is **not Brit-picked** , sadly. So if something pokes your eye, do tell me. I will fix it.
> 
> Beta by [KingTouchy](http://archiveofourown.org/users/KingTouchy/pseuds/KingTouchy)

John finds out from the telly.

It’s Tuesday evening. He is done with the appointments and the post-appointment paperwork and he is leaving for the night. At the front desk, he stops to say goodnight to Emily – she nods, but doesn’t reply; her eyes are transfixed to the TV set in the corner of the waiting room. John turns around and looks up. 

Sherlock looks young. That’s the first thing that comes to John’s mind. This must be archival footage, John thinks, what with short hair like this and the ridiculous leather jacket – but why would they run it, it’s not even the anniversary of Sherlock’s death, that was four months ago—

And then the headlines running across the screen filter through and he gets it.

Breaking news.

The return of Sherlock Holmes.

_The return of Sherlock Holmes._

*

He walks out into the October chill, puts up his collar, and waves down a cab. He gives the cabbie his home address and pulls out his phone. He keeps it turned off during the day – whoever needs him urgently can call the clinic, and there aren’t that many people who text him these days: Harry gives him random calls at late hours, Greg calls after work if he’s in the mood for a pint; Mike checks in sometimes, they go to dinner.

He turns the phone on.

He has twenty six unread messages. Fifteen voicemails.

He wonders about the capacity of his voicemail box. At some point, he thinks, it would be unable to accept new messages, and nobody would be able to reach him. It would be as if he were dead.

He doesn’t check the messages, he doesn’t listen to the voicemail. He switches off the phone and puts it back into his pocket.

*

There is a gaggle of reporters in front of his flat. He is surprised at the number. The story broke just two hours ago; it seems digging out John Watson from the background of the famous neither-fake-nor-dead detective should have taken longer. Why would he even matter?

Ah, he knows exactly why he would matter. Confirmed bachelor John Watson. Never really got a proper tabloid nickname, but that one seems to have stuck.

He redirects the cabbie before they pull over. Too late: a few of the crowd are already advancing, and the rest follow. Armed with mobile phones and cameras, with their mouths open on competing questions, they swarm the car – but the cabbie is better. Also more deadly in his black box of steel. He makes a U-turn, and the group disperses before the cab like so many fish.

They make a stop at a cash machine downtown, where John withdraws a significant sum – his job pays well enough now, he can afford the occasional splurge – and he points the cabbie in the direction perpendicular to the one they came from.

“Hotel, please” he says.

“Expensive?” asks the cabbie, because he is a perceptive chap.

“Any kind,” says John. “Just... away from central London.”

They drive for a while.

*

At the hotel, John pays cash, orders room service, and buys toiletries and a t-shirt from the gift shop. He figures he has at least one hour to kill, and at most twenty four. The cab wasn’t followed, but the CCTV is never too far away. 

He eats the dinner when it’s brought up, and then he takes off his shoes and sits on top of the bedcovers, remote in hand. He turns on the telly, finds a news channel. It doesn’t take long for the stories to circle back round.

They don’t have much footage. Sherlock, caught on the street in a part of London John doesn’t recognize. Greg, coming up from the side, shielding Sherlock from the cameras. Annoyed, the both of them, faces drawn up, as if they were interrupted in the middle of something important. Sherlock is wearing a black leather jacket, with a grey t-shirt underneath, and yes, _jeans_. He’s lost weight. John thinks this is what Sherlock must have looked like six years ago, when John didn’t know him. When Greg did.

Greg bats away at a microphone, barks _No comment at this time_ , and shoves Sherlock in front of him into a police car. Doors slam. The car speeds away. It is all rather cloak and dagger.

The captions roll with their aggressive presumptions, the reporter natters on as if she knows anything. 

She doesn’t know anything. None of them know anything.

John switches off the telly, lies back on the bed and waits.

*

It’s been ninety five minutes.

Doubt is a curious disease. It nags at the back of his brain, lets itself be known in slow tendrils of fear.

He knows exactly what he is doing. He’s been moving in a daze since he stepped out of the clinic, but now he knows his actions were as premeditated as if he were following a script. It took effort, he realises now, not to drive to 221B Baker Street _immediately_ , not to run up those steps, not to open the door and – God, good God – _see for himself_.

Denial bloomed strong and fast, his brain trying to rationalize the news, to fit it within the framework he’d squared himself into in the last sixteen months. _Sherlock is dead_ , it said. _This is wishful thinking_. But the hope, the suspicion, the _certainty_ was already there, waving its frantic hands, shouting over the steady drone of _impossible, impossible, impossible,_ trampling all other options.

He knew it. Whatever he told himself, whatever he had the world tell him, he knew it. He’d known all along.

So yes, he knows exactly what he is doing now, although he might seem like a sissy to the casual observer. _Prove to me how much I mean to you. Show me how much you care._

John is aware he is not at the centre of Sherlock’s universe. Sherlock might have spun smoke and mirrors for John’s benefit when he died – when he departed, when he _disappeared_ – but it is not for John’s benefit that he is now returning. The unvisited flat in Kensington says as much.

_Show me if you care at all, you mad bastard._

It’s been ninety six minutes.

*  
At the two-hour mark, there is a knock on the door.

John gasps. A surge of adrenaline floods him, from his core to the tips of his toes. He knows the stress response very well: sweat breaking out on skin, tunnel vision. His heart is hammering, he can feel the pulse throbbing in his neck, in his ears, in his brain.

He inhales through his nose, exhales. Gets himself under control. He sits up, props himself against the headboard. He glances at himself, does he look presentable— God, he is pathetic. He flexes his hands, lets them relax, and waits.

There is no more knocking. After a while, the key-card reader on the other side of the door beeps. The lock clicks—

John would snort, if he had the breath. Of course Sherlock managed to score the master key.

—the door opens, and on the threshold Sherlock from six years ago is slipping the key-card into his jacket pocket.

They stare at each other for a little while. Some latent chemistry blooms in the vicinity of John’s solar plexus, completely unnecessary – as if he weren’t already destroyed by all this. He inhales and exhales, and keeps breathing.

Sherlock comes into the room and closes the door.

“You should not leave such obvious clues if you don’t wish to be found.”

It hurts. It is physically painful to hear Sherlock’s voice. And it’s excruciating to make words in return. 

There were multiple versions of this conversation John imagined while staring at the ceiling in the past two hours; multiple openings to an exchange that stands between them and normalcy, and John already knows none of it will come out right.

He swallows. “Or you could. I don’t know. Respect my wishes.”

Sherlock inclines his head. “I am,” he says, and there, _there_ is that twist of the lip that makes it plain John’s motives are laid out bare like bone; that self-satisfied smirk that makes John want to throw a punch, and keep punching until they both see what comes out on the other side.

John closes his eyes, leans against the headboard. Darkness calms him. He breathes in, and out. Unclenches his fists. Counts to ten.

Footsteps on the carpet, a rustle: Sherlock coming over, pulling up a chair.

John waits, but Sherlock doesn’t say anything.

God, he’s rehearsed this, so many times. He’s had this conversation with a headstone, with the empty walls of his flat, and with the soft rumbling echo of Sherlock’s voice in his head. He’s had this conversation with himself in the mirror, with the ducks in Regent’s park, and with his coffee cup at the clinic, when he’s forgotten himself and looked out the window for too long. He’s had this conversation in his head, while Ella waited patiently in the chair opposite and the clock ticked on the wall.

He started and finished this conversation so many times the words are worn thin and fragile.

He opens his eyes. He takes a breath. He can do this.

“So you are done, then?”

Sherlock watches him. His hands are clasped, his elbows resting on his thighs, his body leaning forward – conversational position, inviting rapport.

“Nearly,” he says. “One loose end left.” 

John knows he is not the loose end. “Why are you back, then? Don’t they teach you to not leave loose ends? In your covert-ops school, or whatever?”

“My return is inconsequential.”

John snorts.

“For the case, John. Inconsequential for the case.” Sherlock’s clasped fingers flex, release. He looks down at his hands. “I.” He takes a deep breath, exhales. “I didn’t want you to find out like this.” 

John looks at Sherlock’s fingers, pale and strong and free of blood spatter. 

“Like what,” he says, feeling nauseous. “From the news? Ruined you a proper homecoming, did I?”

Sherlock looks up, and his face looks sincere, but there is something there, something in his eyes that is just a bit too calculating.

“John…”

“No,” says John, with force. “No, shut up.” He swallows and swallows until the nausea recedes, until there is nothing left but the hole at the bottom of his stomach. One tip of the boat, and he’ll be lurching over the side of the bed.

“Who else knew?”

Sherlock looks pained. “That is not important.”

“Oh really? You’re going to tell me what’s important now?”

“John…”

“I said shut up.”

Sherlock closes his mouth. The expression on his face is blank for a moment, and then it morphs into almost comical discomfort – which, John reckons, is as close to an apology as it gets on Sherlock Holmes. He wonders if Sherlock studied the muscle arrangement for this in the mirror. How long it took to perfect it.

“Mycroft,” says Sherlock. “I needed… funds.”

Yes, of course. Obvious, when you think about it. “Molly?”

Sherlock’s eyebrows twitch, but he can’t mask the surprise.

“I saw your death certificate,” says John. “She did your autopsy. Not a big leap to make. Tell me, Sherlock, whose body did you have her cut up? Was there even an actual body? Or did you two just stand around for a bit, drinking a cuppa and having a chat?”

Sherlock blinks slowly, but doesn’t say anything.

“Fine,” says John after a while. “Fine. What do you want?”

“You know what I want, John.”

No hesitation. John smiles. He folds his hands on his knees and waits.

After a while, Sherlock frowns. “John.” There’s a lilt in the syllable. It sounds like Mycroft. Like _Stop being an idiot, John._ Like the invocation of his name will make John magically open up and accept everything.

John keeps smiling.

Sherlock presses his lips together. “I’m here,” he says. “What else would you have me do?”

John looks at him.

“Ah,” says Sherlock, slowly. “You want me to ask. Because it’s not enough that I’m here, no, you need words now. As if words could—” He bites his lip, looks away. “All right. Fine. I’m asking.” He looks back at John, piercing, focussed, looks _through_ him. “I am asking now. See? I’m here, I came, just like you wanted.”

John raises an eyebrow.

Sherlock scoffs. “Oh, don’t pretend. This is why you’re here. You’re here, in this ridiculous hotel room, watching the news and waiting for me to come get you, rather than at your flat – which is clever, by the way, at least you don’t have to answer all those questions about our joyful reunion and whether we’ve already shagged each other’s brains out or not. So yes, very clever, congratulations, John, now please take your toothbrush and your shaving kit, and let’s go. I haven’t been to the shops yet, and none of your things are at the flat anymore, so take the new t-shirt too. Your bedroom is untouched, I just had it hoovered and dusted. Tomorrow we will make a trip to your flat and pack your things. You’ll have to break your lease, I’m afraid, but Mycroft can pay the fee, seeing as he still owes me a bit, so there, you see, I’ve asked. Is this good enough now? Can we go?”

And Sherlock inhales, and smiles, and his eyes are sharp, and it doesn’t match. Something doesn’t compute. John looks closer.

Sherlock is never crude, and even less so when alluding to matters of sexual nature. Not unless it serves a purpose, so this choice of words was deliberate. Sherlock is smiling, but he is not relaxed. He is talking quickly, but he doesn’t throw the words to the air, and instead he looks at the result with a singular intent, he _waits_ for the result—

Oh.

Trepidation.

John can see it, plain as day. It’s right there in Sherlock’s eyes, which are out of sync with the self-assured slant of his lip. John doesn’t know how he knows; whether he’s become more attuned to the feelings of others through active practice of medicine for a year, or if he merely unlearned Sherlock’s expressions enough that he can now interpret them anew. Either way, this is fear, deep and grave; there is no doubt in John’s mind about it.

He wonders for a second whether Sherlock practised this one too. How deep does the deception go? Is this all just another magic trick?

He looks at Sherlock, head to toe. Shorn hair, ratty t-shirt (there’s a logo on it, looks heavy metal), leather jacket worn at the seams (second-hand), jeans unevenly faded at the knees where the black tint gave out (new but cheap). Outline of the phone in his pocket, but no scarf or gloves (necessities only).

And with that, stylish black oxfords, polished, new, and completely unmatched to the rest of his outfit.

People rarely look at other’s people shoes, Sherlock told him once. And yet they’re a well of information to a careful observer.

So, the shoes: A practical choice? An omission? A concession in the disguise? So eager to be back wearing bespoke silks and wool and leather that he couldn’t stop himself, even for this? 

If I say yes, John thinks, I will be stepping back into where I was before – a friend, a sidekick; a conductor of light. If I say no... God knows what will happen if we are forced to exist separately in the same city on Earth. Singularity, probably.

He wonders if Sherlock knows what singularity is. Would this be astronomy, or physics? He will have to see if Sherlock has books on the subject, if he—

He laughs. It spills out of him, unfiltered, unblocked. Out of the corner of his eye he sees Sherlock frown, and he can’t help it – it makes him laugh all the more.

God, he really is pathetic.

He looks up. Sherlock is frowning, fighting to keep his expression neutral, and trying not to look smug at the same time, because he knows, he _knows_ he’s already won.

John clears his throat. “I have terms.”

“I accept.”

John cocks his head. “But I haven’t told you what they are.”

“Immaterial. I accept either way.”

“Sherlock…”

“John.”

Trepidation, John thinks. Clear as day. Time to end this. John has never been keen on torture.

“Fine,” he says. Then he slides off the bed, and goes to the bathroom to gather his things.

*

John Watson, as a general rule, does not resort to violence to resolve personal disputes. Substance abuse runs in his family, and it has made him acutely aware of what occurs at the juncture of violence and chemically-induced lack of control. It has also made him aware of his own predispositions, and what would happen if he allowed them to go unchecked.

There is power in knowing your limits.

But then again, there is power in knowing exactly how far they will go.

*

In the cab, he pretends to look out at the London night while Sherlock pretends to do the same. One cannot, however, mistake the nervous jitter of Sherlock’s leg, the tapping of ungloved fingers against lip, against knee, against lip again. John smiles out at the streetlights and says nothing.

The proximity to Sherlock is intoxicating. They’re not touching beyond the occasional brushing of shoulders, but John can smell him – wind, cologne, cigarette smoke – and that is grounding, powerful like lightning, like chains. 

John doesn’t know this cigarette smell, not on Sherlock, not from before, but it makes sense somehow; it makes sense that this is what Sherlock would smell like if he were left for a while to his own devices.

“You have questions,” says Sherlock, when they’re past Westminster Bridge.

John smiles out into the night and doesn’t turn round. He can see Sherlock’s pale reflection in the window, past the shadow of his own face.

“Yes,” he says. “And I’m sure you’re dying to tell me.”

Sherlock looks at him, sharp; the transparent glimmer of his eyes, the thin line of his mouth.

“Oh, you’re dying to tell me all about it,” says John to London outside the cab. “Of all your amazing adventures, and the misadventures of everyone else. Of your travels to places unseen, and the miracles you brought about with your own hand. You, traipsing round the world in four hundred and thirty nine days. Truly, who wouldn’t want to hear everything you have to say.”

He falls silent. In the window, Sherlock’s reflection is unmoving, statuesque, beautiful.

John wants to drive his fist through it. Crush it into pieces until they turn to dust in his hand. The feeling rises from his stomach and fills him to the brim like floodwater. It whites out the edges of his vision, like he’s been staring at one point for a while and his brain forgot his surroundings. He keeps smiling.

“How,” says Sherlock, and clears his throat. “How do you know I was—” He grimaces, breaks the mask, schools it back into its marble lines again. “Traipsing.”

John turns to him. He takes pride in how the muscles in his face don’t contort into a grimace. The tremor inside him rages, perfectly and beautifully contained.

“I don’t,” he says. “I just hope you didn’t spend all this time in London. Because if you did, God help me, I will make you bleed.”


	2. On the Tightrope

221B Baker Street is pristine.

Sherlock has indeed hoovered and dusted, not just John’s room, but also, it seems, everything else in sight. The kitchen is spotless, the sitting room looks like a museum display, and John’s bed upstairs has been made with military precision. This does not look like Mrs Hudson’s hand, and John can neither confirm nor deny it – it’s past midnight when they arrive, and she is already asleep. Sherlock has assured him she’s fine, pre-empting John’s question of what effect Sherlock’s return has had on her health. John will have to check on her tomorrow – they haven’t seen each other in weeks.

He leaves his things in his absolutely sterile bathroom (he knocks over the perfect pile of towels just to make himself feel less uneasy) and goes to join Sherlock downstairs. He stops on the landing, in the open doorway to the sitting room. His heart thuds in his chest, double-time, and then resumes as normal.

Sherlock is sitting by the lamplight at his perfectly clean desk with his laptop open. He is reading, scrolling slowly down the page. He didn’t look up when John came down, in fact he looks like he’s already forgotten about John altogether – and what else is new, this is what Sherlock always does, this is their version of normal—

John covers his mouth with his hand.

Jesus. Jesus Christ.

He breathes in, after a while. It sounds ragged, like something is broken in his respiratory tract. The air is thick, and his head feels heavy. 

God, it’s almost midnight. He has work tomorrow. He should go to sleep.

Sherlock still hasn’t moved. 

John drags in another breath, turns on his heel, and goes to the kitchen to put the kettle on.

The tea is in the same place, and so is the sugar. There is a set of new beakers in the cupboard, and next to them sits John’s RAMC mug. 

John pauses. He has been looking for this mug. He went through all his boxes twice, figured it must have got lost in the move. Never had the nerve to come back looking here.

He takes out the mug, and gets another one for Sherlock. He sets them on the counter, waits for the water to boil, and then for the tea to brew. Soft clicking sounds come in from the sitting room at intervals. 

This is time travel, he thinks as he watches the tea darken and swirl. I’ve travelled in time. I am not myself, I am merely looking out through my eyes at what my life was two years ago, before a maniac came in and wrote Sherlock’s name on a sheet of glass and made everything die. This is time travel, and it cannot possibly last. One cannot step twice into the same river. It’s not sustainable. This life. This life is gone.

He picks up the cups, turns to go into the sitting room.

Sherlock has stopped reading and is looking at him. Sharp cheekbones, eyes turned transparent in the lamplight, hair cropped close behind his ears, curling high on his forehead. Alien. John’s stomach clenches.

There was blood in Sherlock’s hair. If John had touched it, it would have been warm, but they caught his hands and they pulled him away.

‘I’m his friend,’ he said. ‘I’m his friend. Let me through.’ But they grabbed him and pulled him, and tore him away so he could not see the man behind the curtain.

Smoke and mirrors.

Something burns his hand.

He looks down. He has clenched his fist around the handle of his cup, and his knuckles are now touching the side. The tea is hot. The heat is burning his skin through the ceramic.

He blinks. He relaxes his hand a little, shifts his fingers away from the heat. Makes his legs move. He sets Sherlock’s cup on the desk next to his laptop. Then he turns away and walks to his armchair. He sits down, sets his cup on the side table. His legs are trembling. The phantom pain he hasn’t felt in a while makes itself known.

Sherlock is still watching him. He doesn’t say anything.

John sits in the chair. He looks at the room, and the bookshelves, which are identical to how he left them, sixteen months ago. He looks at the cold fireplace. There is a jack-knife, on the mantelpiece, stuck in the dark wood. John looks at it, focuses on the sharp edge of the blade. After a while, his heart rate returns to normal, so he picks up his cup and drinks his tea.

Eventually, Sherlock turns back to his laptop, and they sit there in silence.

*

When Sherlock died on the pavement, John packed his things, found a new flat, stacked his boxes, laid the Sig on the table, and then sat down and wrote himself a list. 

He wrote the list on paper. Posting it on the blog would have gained unwanted attention. And the last thing he needed back then was more attention.

So he wrote the list on paper, in block handwriting, with proper formatting and all. Assumptions, steps, possible outcomes.

Then he ordered the list.

Then he edited the list for a while.

It came down to two possible options.

John did not decide at that moment which one of them he preferred. So he stuck the list to his newly leased refrigerator, put the Sig in the drawer and went looking for a job.

*

In the morning, he awakens to the sound of a gunshot echoing against the ceiling. 

He doesn’t move. He lies quietly in his bed.

Two years ago, he would have run and ducked for cover. Now, he lies on his back, staring at the ceiling, and lets the rational part of his mind work it out. 

It takes him a while, but the sound eventually resolves itself into a door, slamming, downstairs.

He throws off the covers and gets out of bed.

He goes to the bathroom, relieves himself, and brushes his teeth. He pulls on Sherlock’s spare dressing gown over the gift-shop t-shirt and boxers from yesterday, and walks barefoot downstairs. He touches his hand to the railing, trails down the worn wood. He tells himself it’s for the familiar sensation, not for balance.

In the sitting room, Sherlock looks up at him from behind a newspaper. He is sitting in his leather armchair. He is sharply dressed, he has combed his hair, and his shoes are newly polished. He is going out.

“Ah, John.” He smiles, and folds the paper. “Good, you’re up. Get dressed, we have an appointment.”

John opens his mouth.

“No, you don’t have clinic today,” Sherlock says. “I took the liberty of calling in for you. You are free for the rest of the day.”

John closes his mouth. Sherlock’s face is open and bright, and his smile is genuine. There is something wrong with his voice, though. John can’t yet tell what it is. But he will.

“I haven’t any clean clothes,” he says.

“Oh, on the contrary.” Sherlock’s smile is full of teeth.

Footsteps, impeccably timed, sound on the stairs. John turns.

A broad-shouldered man in overalls is coming up to the landing, carrying two cardboard boxes stacked on top of one another. He walks into the sitting room. “Morning!” he says, as he walks around John and sets the boxes next to the sofa.

There are three other boxes already there, stacked up against the wall.

John doesn’t say anything. The man circumvents him neatly again and thunders back down the stairs. The front door slams shut. A moment later, there’s a sound of a lorry starting up.

“That’s the last one, then,” says Sherlock. “Excellent. Why don’t you find something presentable, John? Nothing too fancy, it’s just a trip to the Yard.”

“You moved my stuff,” says John.

Sherlock raises his eyebrows.

“You said we’d go get my stuff today,” says John. “And then you went ahead and sent movers to my flat.”

“You were asleep. I optimized.”

“Optimized.”

“Yes.” Sherlock stands. He throws the paper on the desk and grabs the jack-knife from the mantelpiece. “No sense breaking your back shuffling boxes if there are professionals handy who can do it for you.”

“For Mycroft’s money.”

“Of course.” Sherlock peers at the labelling on one of the boxes. “Now, would you like me to help you find some clothes? I told the movers to label these, but this chicken scratch is unintelligible.” He brandishes the knife with intent.

John comes up to him in two strides and catches his wrist.

“Stop it.” He’s figured out what is wrong with Sherlock’s voice. It wasn’t very difficult.

Sherlock stills. He looks at the wall. His wrist is trembling in John’s grip, like he’s had a quart of coffee for breakfast, like he’s been shooting up. It’s hard to see the look in his eyes from the side like this, but John doesn’t have to.

“Sit down,” John says, and takes the knife from Sherlock’s hand. Sherlock turns on his heel and goes to sit in his armchair. He doesn’t pick up the paper. He drums his fingers on his knee – pat, pat, patitty-pat – and watches John.

John cuts the tape. Then he cuts more tape. He eventually finds the right box, and then he hefts two, one on top of the other, and carries them back up to his bedroom.

Uncertainty, he thinks, as he buttons his shirt in front of the bathroom mirror. Sherlock’s actions speak as loudly as ever, and yet he is still uncertain of his welcome. John is back at their flat, unprotesting, but Sherlock still feels like he needs to lay traps.

Maybe John did give in too early. Maybe Sherlock was prepared for an elaborate game.

Maybe John should give him that, too.

He buttons up the shirt, throws on his new blue jacket. Regards himself in the mirror. Yes. Good enough.

*

By the time they catch a cab to New Scotland Yard, Sherlock appears to have settled somewhat. He’s been checking things on his mobile, huffed in annoyance once or twice. The trembling is gone from his hands. He is wearing his old coat, with his dramatic collar. His gloves are in his pocket. His scarf is wrapped around his neck. 

John looks at him a few times, doesn’t linger. He doesn’t want Sherlock to turn to him, doesn’t want to meet those eyes and have to come up with an excuse. He’s always been crap at lying to Sherlock, but then everyone is crap at lying to Sherlock.

Well, maybe except the late Irene Adler.

John doesn’t want to lie because he knows what shows on his face might not be what Sherlock expects. Concern, longing, joy – all of those things, they would show up in a normal person, in a situation like this. They would show up if Sherlock were returning, say, from South America, on a tail end of a very long, solitary trip, spent entirely on cataloguing poisonous snakes. In that case John would have been able to translate what he felt into predictable facial expressions. 

Concern, longing, joy – well, John feels none of these things.

He thinks about Sherlock’s reflection in the window the night before. The white marble. The red blood in black hair.

His shoulder twinges. He flexes his fingers, and lets out a slow, long breath. Counts to ten.

Next to him, Sherlock frowns at his mobile, then switches it off and drops it into his pocket. He looks out at London and doesn’t speak.

Good enough, thinks John. Yes. Yes, indeed.

*

They find Greg in his office, buried in papers.

“You’re late,” he says as Sherlock comes in, but then he notices John and closes his mouth.

“I was busy,” says Sherlock. He puts his hands in his pockets. “Shall we?”

Greg gathers a few envelopes and stands up. “Yeah. Yeah, come on. I’ll tell Jackson to call them back in.”

He looks harried. John wonders how many candids of the Inspector will appear in various newspapers tomorrow. _The Vindicated DI. Moriarty Was Real. The Case of the Vanishing Detective._

Sherlock whirls out of the room. John makes a move to follow, but Greg stops him.

“John... Uh.” He looks uncomfortable.

“Let me guess,” says John. “Classified?”

Greg glances after Sherlock, who is already far down the hall. “He didn’t tell you.”

“No,” says John. “It’s fine.” He forces himself to smile at Greg, and he thinks, _God, why am I even here?_

Beyond the glass wall, Sherlock has stopped between the cubicles and is looking back at the two of them.

“Why don’t you—” says Greg, and John says, “I will just—”

They laugh together, but it fizzles out quickly.

“I’ll make myself at home,” says John.

Greg’s shoulders loosen. “Yeah. Okay. Won’t be long. Just... Stay in my office, would you?”

The door swings shut behind him. 

John stands in the empty office for a little while, and then goes to get himself coffee.

*

When Sherlock died on the pavement, John made a list, put the Sig in the drawer, and got a job.

The list is still stuck to the refrigerator at the flat in Kensington. It is stuck there with a black, round magnet. John got the box of magnets at Tesco’s. He only used the one.

He wonders whether the movers saw the list.

He wonders whether Sherlock saw it.

He wonders if his landlord will read it when he cleans up the flat for the next tenant.

He realizes he doesn’t care who reads it, because he _wants_ them to.

He wants _someone_ to know.

*

He checks the news on his phone, fires off a quick mail to Emily to apologise and to say he’ll be back tomorrow. Then he drinks his coffee and plays Bejeweled for half an hour, because he’s on vacation, so he might as well make use of it. He’s practiced the art of looking like he belongs anywhere, so nobody disturbs him.

He has a brief interlude of self-pity by the soda machine, but he grabs a Coke and gets over himself. This isn’t the longest stakeout he has done for Sherlock, and not even the most boring one. The stint in the jam factory takes that particular cake.

Well, at least there was jam.

Two and a half hours later, the door to Greg’s office opens again. John looks up from an almost-done Sudoku.

Sherlock is leaning against the doorframe. He smiles. “Breakfast?”

John switches off his phone. “It’s half past noon.” But he stands up and reaches for his jacket all the same.

“Lunch, then,” says Sherlock.

“Lead on.”

They go out the emergency exit, where a cab is waiting for them, idling at the curb. John is about to open his mouth to ask if they’re running away from Greg, but then they round a corner and see the crowd that has gathered in front of the Yard. Microphones and cameras hover at the ready, but they are all pointed at the main door. John laughs and ducks into the cab.

They ride for a while in a familiar direction, and John wonders if Sherlock is consciously replaying their first meeting – but they don’t end up at Angelo’s, and instead Sherlock leads them to a Thai place very close to Baker Street. John hasn’t seen it there before; it must have opened recently.

Sherlock orders for them both, and they drink their water in silence, ice clinking. Sherlock, who has placed himself strategically facing the exit, is looking out at the street. John looks at the condensation on his glass.

“So,” John says, after a while. “Classified, then?”

Sherlock’s eyes slowly come to rest on John’s face. “I thought you weren’t interested in my traipsing.”

“I never said I wasn’t interested.” He tips his glass towards Sherlock. “And you still look like you’re dying to tell me.”

Sherlock regards him for a moment. “Well, maybe I don’t particularly want you to punch me.”

John smiles. “Who said anything about punching?”

Sherlock narrows his eyes. John knows that look. Eidetic memory – Sherlock is recalling the exact wording John used in the cab last night. A line appears between Sherlock’s eyebrows, and John lifts his glass to his mouth to hide a grin. God, is this really that simple? He should have been able to read Sherlock from the start – the man projects like a bloody antenna.

“Only the last three weeks,” says Sherlock.

“Pardon?”

“I was in London only the last three weeks. The Adair case. You might have heard.”

John hasn’t heard, not exactly. He does recall the name from a headline or two, but it has been a really bad week at the clinic, and he hadn’t the time to follow the news.

“The loose end?”

“All tied up now.”

“Good.”

“Yes.”

John waits.

Sherlock frowns. “What?”

John shrugs. “Nothing. Just… you’re back for good, then? No more… I don’t know… side trips, clean-up jobs, that sort of stuff?”

Sherlock frowns.

“If I,” he says, and stops. “If I start telling you.” He stops again, bites his lip. “If I start telling you why I did it, will you tell me to shut up again?”

John smiles. “I don’t know. It really depends on what you say.”

“Hm.” Sherlock touches his glass, traces the moisture around the rim with his fingers. Then he takes a deep breath. 

“He said there were three bullets.”

*

The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Whether that applies to John’s personal hell might be up for debate. Yes, Sherlock knows what he did to John. Yes, he had good reasons to do it. It was the logical course of action, and there might have been no other way. John might have helped, or he might have stumbled and died. They might have both died, in the worst-case scenario. 

Sherlock doesn’t deal in might-have-beens; he deals in facts. And the facts are: they are both alive, they’re eating Thai at a nice restaurant in central London, and Jim Moriarty is decomposing in a hole in the ground with a hole in his parietal bone.

If John had half a brain, he would just delete last sixteen months, wouldn’t he?

*

The food comes halfway through Sherlock’s ramblings about India. John eats – it’s delicious; best Thai he’s had in years – and Sherlock just swirls his fork around in the curry and keeps talking. The tone of his voice, the words crowding and stumbling upon one another in a rush to deliver the story, the way his hands want to join the conversation – it feels astonishingly normal; it’s what they would have done after a case, after Sherlock had gone on his own and then had to relay absolutely everything, every last juicy detail, every last shred of deduction, lay it all down for John to admire.

The only thing John is keen on admiring right now is the food. He wonders how Sherlock knew about this place. He wonders why it had never caught his own attention before. 

He wonders whether Sherlock will pick up the tab.

“You look good,” says Sherlock, and John realises he missed the end of the story. He looks up. Sherlock gestures at him with the fork. He still hasn’t started eating. 

“You’ve gained four pounds, even though you haven’t been sleeping well,” says Sherlock. “You like your new job, it pays more, and the benefits are better. The receptionist fancies you, obviously, but you should make a move soon. The new nurse has caught her eye, and he’s younger and rather more fit than you. You haven’t been exercising enough, you should do something about that, or else change your diet. Too many carbs, John. They’re addictive. You should know that.”

John stills. Sherlock pokes at his own rice-less curry and smiles. John regards his own meal: chicken and vegetables in oyster sauce. No rice either. Sherlock ordered. John has been distracted by the taste and the newness of the place, didn’t notice the lack of the usual filler.

He frowns. Thinks back to the morning. Boxes in the sitting room. Sherlock calling in to the clinic. Hours spent at the Yard with nothing to do.

It’s been less than twenty-four hours, and already his free will has been subsumed in Sherlock’s.

He jabs at his food, shoves it into his mouth, and then speaks with his mouth full, just to coax the distaste onto Sherlock’s face.

“You don’t have to keep tabs on me, Sherlock. I’ve managed quite well myself, you know.”

Sherlock doesn’t look perturbed by his lack of table manners. “I’m not keeping tabs on you.” 

“Right. So that trip to Scotland Yard was what, sightseeing? You knew damn well they wouldn’t let me in on your secret Interpol job.”

Sherlock’s eyebrows twitch. “I didn’t expect the debriefing to take so long. They’re all morons, they don’t know how to listen.”

“Yes, clearly.” John stabs at his food again. “I’m going to work tomorrow, Sherlock. Don’t care if you call in, so don’t bother.”

“Lunch, then.”

John looks at him. “You’re really not helping your case here, you know that, right?”

“I’m not keeping tabs, John.” Sherlock sounds irritated, like John is being slow. He swirls his curry around again as if he’s attempting to read the future from bamboo shoots and coconut milk. He is still not eating.

John looks closely. The shape of Sherlock’s mouth, curled downwards at the corners. The lines on his brow. The way he is sitting, perched at the edge of the chair, tight as a bowstring. Like the balance between the two of them is about to snap any second, and Sherlock will fall to pieces with nothing to hold him upright.

Loneliness, John’s mind supplies without his conscious involvement. 

God, he thinks. God, make it _stop._

Because he can’t block this. He sees everything now. Every twitch, every blink, every forcefully blank expression. He sees it and he processes it, and then he knows; it’s that simple. 

He wonders if it’s always been there, this clarity, and he just never took the time to observe. 

He wonders if Sherlock is faking this, too.

But no. That lip, that brow, that tension. John knows this, he’s seen it before. It’s doubt, it’s loneliness, it’s fear.

Sherlock doesn’t have any friends. Sherlock doesn’t know how to make friends. He only knows how to lose them.

And it terrifies him.

John picks up his glass, takes a drink. His hand isn’t shaking. It should be shaking, he thinks, with this newfound awareness. Because at this moment, he holds Sherlock in the palm of his hand. It’s dizzying, the raw power of it. It makes him drunk, makes him high. Drugs are Sherlock’s vice of choice, but at this moment, John knows he could be persuaded.

He drowns this knowledge in his ice-cold water, sets his glass carefully on the table. On the other side of the booth, Sherlock is still slowly swirling his curry, and his expression is finally clouding into something undecipherable – and John is grateful for that.

He stabs at his food, forces himself to take another bite, and then he looks at Sherlock, really looks at him: at the entirety of this impossible man, a man who was dead and yet is now seated in a leather booth opposite John in a rather excellent Thai restaurant, on a rather chilly autumn day in London, in this city which is home, John’s home, and Sherlock’s home now again too; Sherlock, who is his friend, who is present again where he has always been, where he is supposed to be, whole and alive and unbroken.

Sherlock looks up, and the mask of marble is not marble anymore. It’s real living tissue, over real bones, and carrying a very real, unbelievably brilliant, and extremely irritating brain.

John swallows, and forces a smile onto his face.

“And you look like shit. Eat your curry, Sherlock, before you pass out.”


	3. Earth Moving

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Remember those warnings I mentioned in chapter 1? They begin to go in effect.
> 
> Also, this chapter refers to an [NDA](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-disclosure_agreement).

Sherlock came back different.

His body is that of a man six years younger, but he slows down in the street to match John’s gait instead of running ahead. He still talks faster than John can think, but he also listens to what John has to say, or at least makes affirmative noises at the right moments. Things are still ‘boring, uninteresting, and dull’, but the people at the coffee shop are subject to a glance, with no vivisecting descriptions to follow.

There is milk in the fridge even though John has not been to Tesco’s, and there’s also bread, and – God in heaven – lettuce. The sitting room remains close to pristine, and experiments are nowhere in sight. Mrs Hudson – who is indeed all right – shakes her head when inquired, so John considers this new Sherlock, who in his foreign sojourns somehow discovered politeness and tact, and he allows himself a careful moment of optimism among the moments of doubt, because maybe it is indeed just that simple.

Maybe it is going to be good enough. 

*

He finds the unsigned NDA on Sherlock’s desk when he returns from work one day. It’s lying on top of some other Yard documents, so Greg must have dropped it off along with cases for Sherlock to look at. The folders all look unopened. John shuffles through them. 

“Sherlock?”

Sherlock is meditating on the sofa, hands folded over his chest. He doesn’t reply.

There’s a half-finished cigarette in the Buckingham Palace ashtray on the coffee table. The flat is a bit cold, so Sherlock must have opened the window at some point. He has taken to smoking at the windowsill; John doesn’t know how much; Sherlock never smokes outright when John’s at home, and he cleans up after himself.

John sets the paperwork back on the desk. “Sherlock.”

Sherlock doesn’t open his eyes. He doesn’t even stir.

Fear, cold and paralysing, grips John so hard he stumbles and has to hold himself up on the back of a chair. He stands there, motionless, looking at Sherlock, searching for signs of breathing, of life, because _God, wouldn’t that be the cruellest of all_ —

Sherlock’s chest rises and falls, slow. He is asleep.

John doesn’t laugh; he expels the air from his lungs. It might be a sob. He isn’t sure.

He slides into the chair and sits there for some time. He stares at nothing at first, and then finds himself staring at Sherlock’s toes, at his bare feet propped against the arm of the sofa.

He counts back in his head. It’s been three weeks. Sherlock has been out of the flat on official resurrection business, on official Interpol business, out to dinner with John, out to the coffee shop with John, and maybe out somewhere else – John doesn’t know; he has a full-time job now, and they don’t keep tabs on each other, not after the first day – but John is fairly sure Sherlock has not been to any crime scenes, even illegally. There hasn’t been a single puzzle, and not a single client has come through the door. As far as John knows, Sherlock hasn’t even checked his blog.

People do know he’s back. There are reporters still sniffing about Baker Street, trying to catch a glimpse of Sherlock through the window. Trying to catch the two of them, probably – and good luck with that. Nothing new under the sun.

But no clients. No cases. No crime scenes. Nada. Zip.

After the stink of having an unauthorized consultant assisting the Met had blown over, and the cases had been re-examined with a fine-toothed comb (not a single fault, obviously, neither Sherlock’s, nor Greg’s), the press turned two or three times before they forgot about the whole thing altogether. Long since the juicy affair of Murdoch and News of the World, they were on the hunt for something bigger again. Sherlock did not qualify.

Greg and his team had been under the Eye of Sauron for six months, and then the unsolved crime statistics returned to pre-Sherlock days, and people started to notice. Greg had complained about it to John over many a pint, and wished the Yard had come up with the office of the ‘unofficial-official consultant’ a tad sooner.

John thinks about the NDA. He thinks about Sherlock sleeping when he should be running back to the Yard with the long-awaited paper in hand and insinuating himself into at least three crime scenes at once.

He thinks about his own blog, untouched since June last year.

He looks at Sherlock’s toes again. It’s November, and Sherlock walks around the flat barefoot. John doesn’t know if Sherlock went out today. He doesn’t even know when Sherlock last changed out of his pyjamas.

This must a period of transition, he thinks. Sherlock will sign the NDA. He will become an unofficial-official consultant. In no time at all, they will be sloughing through the Thames mud, searching for clues, and John will have had enough of it before he even remembers he missed it.

Perhaps it’s not going to be today. That is fine. Everyone needs time to decompress, to come back to their senses.

He looks at Sherlock on the sofa a while longer. Then he throws a blanket over his friend and goes upstairs to sleep.

*

The thought nags at him the next day, breaking his concentration and making him mess up his paperwork. He left in the morning before Sherlock woke up, and he’d be running back to the flat if he weren’t so bloody busy. But the winter season is starting, and with it the flus and the colds, and he doesn’t even have time to go out to lunch; he grabs a sandwich from the vending machine when he gets ten minutes between patients.

In the evening, he gets proper takeout, and takes a cab, because he is too hungry to meander around on public transportation.

When he gets home, Sherlock is sitting at the kitchen table, with his back to the door, looking into a microscope.

Sherlock is still in pyjamas, doesn’t look like he’s changed since yesterday night. There are bits of unidentified matter on slides arranged on the table in front of him. John doesn’t know where Sherlock got those, but that’s not the point. The point, one John gets when he’s already taken off his shoes and hanged up his jacket, is that Sherlock is _sitting at a microscope._

All of Sherlock’s laboratory equipment had been donated. His personal belongings had been packed and stuck in a warehouse somewhere for a while, until Mycroft had them dusted off and arranged back at the flat. John doesn’t know if Mrs Hudson rented 221B to anyone in the interim, and he doesn’t want to know; the thought of someone else being here, some strangers inhabiting Sherlock’s space, is too disturbing.

He comes up to the table, peers at one of the slides. It looks grey-black, like dust. “Got a case, then?”

Sherlock continues to look into the ocular, and doesn’t reply. He adjusts the focus, fingers moving slowly on the dials.

John walks around the table, looks closely at the microscope. “Oh, this is very nice. Expensive equipment. Top of the line. Where did you get it?”

Nothing. John is used to being ignored, especially when Sherlock is too deep in his own head to see or hear the world around him, but he recognizes evasion when he sees it.

This is almost too easy.

“Well, I brought dinner, and I don’t know about you, but I’m knackered, and very hungry, so I’m going to clear the table now, all right? I hope you don’t need these anymore.” He makes a swiping gesture towards the slides.

"I had it delivered." 

Small victories. John will take them where he can get them. “Didn’t go out, then?”

Sherlock leans back with a heavy sigh, then looks at the wall past John’s shoulder. “Proceed to your point, John.”

John leans against the counter. He crosses his arms. The takeout smells heavenly, and he really is very hungry, but he can wait a little longer. He doesn’t know whether Sherlock has eaten today. He doesn’t remember when he last saw Sherlock eat. 

“You know my point.”

Sherlock’s fingers are still resting on the dials. He looks at John for a little while, and John looks right back. He keeps his face relaxed, open; Sherlock will see through it anyway.

Sherlock presses his lips together. “Fine.” He stands up, goes over to where John is standing, and waits for him to move out of the way. When John steps aside, Sherlock takes the bin from under the sink, goes back to the table, and sweeps all the slides into the bin. He replaces the bin under the sink and sits back at the table. He adjusts focus and looks into the microscope again.

John nods to himself. Good enough. He brings the takeout bags to the table and starts unpacking the containers – Chinese, the kind he associates with home, cosy date nights, and a general warmth of familiar surroundings. He lays a pair of chopsticks down for Sherlock, just in case, and digs in with bliss.

Sherlock doesn’t join him. John goes through half of the food while Sherlock keeps working – or whatever it is he’s doing; he’s not taking any notes, he just keeps looking at the single slide as if it holds the secret to life, the universe and everything. He’s making miniscule movements with his fingers.

Sherlock has very long fingers. Thin wrists, elegant. All of him is very well made, and even thinner and sharper as he is right now, he remains a solid presence at the table. John has never been interested in Sherlock’s physicality, save to appreciate the construction of it from a medical standpoint – and yes, he knows what the press has made them out to be; his sixteen months of relationship aversion did not help banish the image of a grieving lover. The tabloids had a feast.

He remembers the moment he stopped protesting. It didn’t matter by then, anyway. 

He looks at Sherlock’s fingers, gentle on the dials.

Yes, I loved you. I loved you, you bloody bastard, and look what you’ve gone and done with that. I loved you, and I put you in the ground, and I stood at your bloody grave until I couldn’t look at it anymore, because you were supposed to give me a bloody miracle and you never did. 

Sherlock continues to stare at the slide, obviously content to watch it until the sample decomposes before his eyes. John chews a piece of orange chicken. He lets his eyes slide over the cradle of Sherlock’s knuckles, follow the lines of tendons and bones under the pale skin. There is a small round mark on the inside of Sherlock’s left wrist, just below where Sherlock’s dressing gown sleeve has ridden up. The skin is even whiter there, parchment-thin. John can’t recall if he’s seen the mark before; it looks like a souvenir from a botched experiment. He tries to remember which one, but he can’t pinpoint it now.

Look at me, he thinks morosely. Even now the first thing on my mind is your goddamn well-being. Look at me, not even putting up a token resistance, just sitting back and waiting for you to come down from a sixteen-month high, making you tea and bringing you food, waiting on you for hours, for days, so keen on getting my hands dirty I can’t even breathe, while you can’t be arsed to put on your pants and get out of the flat like a normal person.

And if I want to break your elegant fucking fingers, just break them all, one by one, so you stop fiddling with the bloody microscope and tell me what the bloody hell is wrong with you, does this mean I still love you? Tell me, Sherlock, what does that make me?

“Why don’t you do it then?”

John blinks. Sherlock is still looking into the eyepiece, as if he hasn’t spoken at all. John clears his throat.

“Pardon?”

Sherlock looks up. Pale eyes, washed out. No expression. “Do it.” Sherlock’s voice is very gentle. “I won’t run. I will even stay still if it helps you to aim.”

John looks at him. “I have no idea what—”

Sherlock slams his fist on the table. “For God’s sake, John! I cut my hair, I didn’t have a lobotomy.”

John sits very still. 

Sherlock’s smile is a nasty thing. “And I might as well have had one. Because even a brain-damaged fruit-bat can tell what you’re thinking.” 

John juts his chin. “And what would that be.”

Sherlock looks at him like he’s considering. 

Sherlock, considering whether he should say something or not, is a singular sight. John takes it in, commits it to memory.

“You want to punch me,” says Sherlock. “Every time you look at my face. And it isn’t just subtext, oh no. You think about it, you actively consider ways in which you could hurt me, and I can see it, right there: in your hand, in your face, in your posture. You can’t look at me without thinking of violence, you can’t stop ever since I came to get you at your hotel. And yet you bottle it up. Why? Did your therapist tell you it’s unhealthy to lash out at others? Do you still want to solve this with _conversation_? Tell me, John, what can I possibly say to convince you to put last year behind us and _bloody move on_?”

John flexes his fingers. His hands hurt. He’d been squeezing the life out of his chopsticks, and he didn’t notice. He puts the chopsticks down.

“I don’t know, Sherlock. Maybe you could try getting dressed and leaving the bloody flat for a change?”

Sherlock narrows his eyes. The look on his face is terrifyingly familiar – John hasn’t seen Sherlock look at anything like this, not in a long while: it’s his dissecting look, the one he uses when he needs to zoom in on the subject at the microscopic level.

John is about to be taken apart.

“No,” says Sherlock thoughtfully. “No, that’s not it. You’d like me to think that you’re worried about me, that my inaction is what this is about, but no. In fact, you barely just noticed, did you? You keep glancing at that paper on my desk, but you haven’t said anything, you haven’t even asked.” He cocks his head. “You’re not uninterested. Quite the opposite, you can’t wait. But you won’t ask me, not to my face. Why is that, John? Are you afraid of what I might say? Or is it…Oh. Ohhh.”

John takes a very long, very slow breath, and wills his hands not to shake.

“You’re afraid,” Sherlock says, and smiles, the same self-satisfied smirk that makes John want to throw a punch and keep punching. “You’re afraid of what you might do if I say the wrong thing. Hm, how chivalrous of you. Well, no need.” He grips the edge of the table, and pushes himself away in his chair, then sits straight and lays his hands on his knees. “Let’s get this over with right now.”

John doesn’t move. Sherlock waits.

John lets him wait for a while longer, and imagines how this evening could end.

He imagines himself standing up, walking around the table, standing in front of Sherlock, and taking a swing. He imagines Sherlock keeping his eyes open to the very last moment. He imagines the force of the blow dislodging Sherlock from the chair and sending him to the floor. Would John have the guts to kick him, too, or would he just stand there, his knuckles bruising over? Over and done. There and gone.

He closes his eyes. Takes a breath. No. Not like this.

Not _good enough._

He thinks about the fear in Sherlock’s eyes, about the raw power that comes from having someone depend entirely on you. Sherlock is so much better at wielding this power. He does what he wills with it, yanks the chain any which way he pleases. John can’t ever hope to compete.

He blinks his eyes open. Sherlock is watching him. There is a shiver working its way through Sherlock’s limbs, barely perceptible. It’s November, John thinks, but Sherlock isn’t cold. He is shivering, and smiling, and his smile is half-mocking now, and half impatient.

“I meant what I said,” Sherlock says, low. “I won’t run.” 

Sherlock’s smile is impatient and mocking and completely fake, and John has had enough of this. Maybe, maybe this is exactly what Sherlock expected to happen, maybe he engineered exactly this emotion in John, because he knows which buttons to push and which threads to pull. Maybe John really is so pathetic that he will follow this man into anything, anywhere. 

Sherlock comes back on his own terms and on his terms alone, and if this means John finds out from the telly and not from a knock on the door, if this means he gets a provocation instead of an apology, and if this means he reacts the way Sherlock wants him to react – well, then so be it. What Sherlock wants, Sherlock gets.

John stands up. He flexes his fingers.

Sherlock’s eyes light up. John knows this smile, too. Triumph is easy to read on Sherlock’s face – it’s been a frequent visitor. John answers it with a tight smile of his own and walks around the table.

Then he goes and locks the door between the corridor and the kitchen.

Sherlock turns in his chair. He looks on, frowning, as John goes and locks the door between the corridor and the sitting room, and then as John moves on to close both curtains on the windows overlooking Baker Street. John reads impatience, and a little bit of fear, in the aggressive angles of Sherlock’s body. He walks up, stands in the sliding door to the kitchen, and begins to unbuckle his belt.

Sherlock’s eyebrows go all the way up.

John wants to smile, but he keeps it locked in. “Take off your t-shirt and stand with your back to me.” He pulls his belt out of the loops with a swish.

Sherlock doesn’t move from the chair.

Impatience has evaporated. Fear has transformed into a whole-body tremble Sherlock is trying very hard to suppress. But the surprise – _the surprise_ is what John savours the most.

Sherlock, for once in his life, has no idea what John is going to do.

John winds the buckle end of the belt around his hand. Means and meaning. Sherlock should be able to translate this now.

“I will only ask once, Sherlock.”

Sherlock blinks, then blinks again, and for a while, doesn’t move a muscle. And then he abruptly unfolds himself from the chair to his full, staggering height. He sheds his dressing gown in quick motions, and then holds it in his hands as if he’s unsure what to do with it. He finally drops it on the back of the chair. Then he grasps the hem of his t-shirt and pulls it over his head.

John holds the belt, and looks on.

Sherlock’s skin is pale under the fluorescent light. His muscles stand out sharper, the bones of his ribs are distinct, and the softness around his middle from the previous New Year’s Day is gone. The drawstring of his trousers is pulled tight beneath the arrow of his hipbones. His feet are bare on the hardwood floor.

He hangs the t-shirt on the back of the chair. 

“Where. Um. Where do you want me?”

The hesitation sounds honest, but there is nothing John will believe out of Sherlock’s mouth right now.

He considers. He intended to have Sherlock bend over the table, but now he can see there isn’t enough space for this in the kitchen; too many breakables in the way, and he doesn’t want to clean up the microscope or the Chinese leftovers.

He steps to the side and gestures towards the sitting room. “Wherever you’re comfortable.”

Sherlock inclines his head, then walks over to the fireplace – no hesitation – and puts his hands on the mantelpiece. John steps in behind him, looks at the narrow slope of Sherlock’s back, and allows himself to experience a tectonic shift.

When he does this with women, there is a mutual understanding that this – every time, without fail – is a prelude to sex. And in every case, the shift has already happened: in the moment they met, when they smiled, exchanged glances, when they acknowledged the want through verbal and non-verbal cues. John is good at this – used to be good at this, before the war and the shrapnel and the cane, but not after Sherlock.

He considers the vulnerability of skin presented to him, freely and with the expectation that John will deal pain, because pain is deserved. This moment, when Sherlock is transforming himself from friend and patient to _subject_ , this moment is as precious as it is important, because it only ever happens once, the way any first sexual encounter only ever happens once.

This moment is precious and it needs to be savoured, but a prelude is a prelude and this is not the part that gets John aroused.

This is the part that gets him to let go.

He wonders what is in it for Sherlock.

He considers Sherlock’s back, the white expanse of it, with a sparse dusting of freckles across the shoulders. Sherlock’s hair is growing back out, already curling at the back of his neck. A few faint, white scars adorn his skin: a stab wound here, a puncture wound there, a jagged line under his left shoulder blade, where the flesh was torn by some sharp but uneven implement. A graze crosses his left bicep (a blade, could be anything from a knife to a small sword) and a small web of disturbed tissue mars his side (a bullet must have gone clean through). Most of them are years old, nothing to write home about.

There is a freshly scarred patch of skin over Sherlock’s left elbow – bullet wound, small caliber – and a few faint, darker lines across his shoulder blades and on the back of his neck – bruises, weeks old, disappearing. Impossible to tell what made them. 

They must have still hurt three weeks ago, when Sherlock tracked John halfway through London. John didn’t notice. Sherlock didn’t say.

“So what now?” says Sherlock, and John snaps back to the present.

Sherlock is watching him in the mirror over the fireplace, and suddenly his confident stroll from earlier makes perfect sense – this way Sherlock can see every expression on John’s face as they do what they’re about to do next.

John tightens his hand on the belt, squares his shoulders, and exhales through his nose. “Now? Now you count.”

*

Later, when John thinks about his first mistake, this will not be it. He is a doctor, he has a utilitarian interest in the human body. He is also a soldier, and he is familiar with the practical applications of human suffering.

In a warzone, it was his job to reconcile both under the same roof.

He has not been in a warzone for a very long time.

*

“Structured punishment,” Sherlock says, with wonder. “But you’re not using bondage and you’re delegating the terms. You’re assuming a lot, and that’s… that’s really quite clever.”

John doesn’t say anything. He waits.

“Very clever, John, yes.” Sherlock laughs softly. “Tell me, did you come up with this just now, or did you have to think about it? Because I’ve seen a lot on your face, but I haven’t seen this, and there is always something, isn’t there, there is always—”

“Sherlock.” John flexes his fingers on the belt. “Remember what I said about not repeating myself?”

Sherlock meets his eyes in the mirror. The self-satisfied smirk lingers around his mouth.

“Where did you imagine me?” he says, as if John hasn’t spoken. His voice is quiet, intimate. If they weren’t in the sitting room, Sherlock naked to the waist and John with a leather implement in his hand, they might as well be in bed. “Where did you see me? Here, like this? Or maybe at your little flat? Is there even enough space there for something like this? I think not. So it was here, had to be here. Wasn’t really that inconvenient to move back in right away, was it?”

John doesn’t reply. He keeps his hands at his sides.

“Oh, fine. One. Now tell me—”

John swings and strikes. 

Sherlock staggers. His breath leaves his lungs in a rush, his body sways forward and down. He doesn’t let go of the mantelpiece. 

John returns his hands to his sides. The snap of leather on flesh, shocking in the sudden silence, echoes in his ears.

Sherlock straightens up, limb by limb, and returns to position. He flexes his fingers, plants his feet a few inches wider apart. His mouth is pressed thin, and his knuckles are white. A broad red line is forming across his shoulders. John watches the mark, then meets Sherlock’s eyes in the mirror.

They both realise it at the same time, and John sees the understanding dawn on Sherlock’s face while he keeps any trace of it gone from his own.

Sherlock placed himself in front of the mirror so he could watch John’s face. Like his personal private theatre: John, revealing a new side of himself; a situation he’s never been in before. In charge, but still dancing to Sherlock’s private tune. _Delegating the terms._

Well. Funny things, mirrors.

John meets and holds Sherlock’s gaze, and raises his eyebrows.

“Two,” says Sherlock, without inflection.

John swings.

*

The streets are far from deserted at midnight. John meanders through crowds of people spilling from pubs, drinking and laughing in the damp, chilly air. He stops once or twice, considers going in and getting drunk with them, watching a match, finding someone. He would take her back to the flat, kiss her quietly on the stairway, tell her which steps to avoid because they creak too much. He wouldn’t show her the sitting room, wouldn’t invite her for coffee.

They would go straight into his bedroom, and he would kiss her again, and undress her, and then fall into her and get drunk some more: on her smell, on her touch, on her taste. He could let himself drown.

He could do that.

He ignores the drinks and the laughter, steps around the few people most unsteady on their feet, and keeps walking.

On the street corners, he stops and looks for the sleek black car. If anything would warrant Sherlock’s guardian angel showing up, tonight would be it.

Sherlock counted to twenty six before he couldn’t stand up anymore. He stopped looking back at John in the mirror at twelve, and the tremor in his arms broke out at sixteen. He got his breathing under control, and he didn’t make any sounds except for the steady drone of numbers, up and up and up. John waited for him to pause, to stop, to revoke his unspoken consent; shatter the bubble, call John out on the absurdity of this exercise, get his clothes back on, sit at the microscope, and ignore John for the rest of the night. Maybe light a cigarette, let the smoke chase John out of the flat.

Sherlock didn’t stop. He settled into a rhythm of count-brace-exhalation that faltered only when John let the belt wrap once or twice. John synchronized himself to that rhythm, fell into the easy back and forth of it like falling into a conversation. The welts on Sherlock’s skin rose slowly, broad, even lines crossing one another. His arms shook.

At twenty seven, John lowered his hand. Sherlock braced, and waited, but the tremor in his legs was making his whole frame quiver. His fingers were slipping from the mantelpiece. He shifted his hands and kept his hold.

John unwound the belt from around his hand and began sliding it back into his trousers.

“Twenty seven,” said Sherlock.

John slid the belt all the way through and buckled it up.

“John. Twenty seven.”

“We’re done.”

Sherlock looked up. John met his eyes. The expression on Sherlock’s face was as complex as it was entirely transparent: part pain, part confusion, and, overlaid on top, the wide-eyed look that John knew very well – it showed right after Sherlock had retreated inside his brain to string a deduction, and then emerged, victorious.

_Revelation._

They stared at each other for a moment, and then John turned away and went into Sherlock’s bathroom. He put a towel under cold water, and wrung it out. When he came back to the sitting room, Sherlock was still leaning against the fireplace. He’d locked his knees, and let his head fall forward to his chest. His back was a patchwork of red stripes. There wasn’t any blood.

“Lie down,” said John.

Sherlock didn’t move. 

John came up to him and touched his shoulder. Sherlock flinched, and John opened his hand, held it up and away for a moment, but then laid it on Sherlock’s shoulder again and didn’t let go.

“Come on,” he said. “Let’s get you cleaned up.”

“I didn’t ask you to stop,” said Sherlock, into his breastbone.

His skin was warm and slippery under John’s hand, and John realised there was sweat itching down his own back as well. He rolled his shoulders to make the itch go away. Then he hooked one finger in the dip behind Sherlock’s left collarbone and tugged, gently. “My terms, Sherlock. Come on.”

Later, when Sherlock was lying quietly on the sofa, his face pressed into the crook of his elbow, his skin cleaned to John’s satisfaction, and the cold towel stretched across his back, John stood up, put on his shoes and his coat, turned off the light in the sitting room and left.

He walks now, through the pub rush hour, dodging drunks and not looking at screens. The black car doesn't appear, and the CCTV cameras focus on nothing in particular.

He is content, and so very calm he’d even risk calling himself peaceful. The sweat on his back has dried. Nothing shakes, his leg doesn’t hurt, and the image of Sherlock’s broken skull on the pavement is just that – an image.

He crosses another street, passes another pub and keeps walking.

*

When he comes back to the flat, his feet are sore and it’s past 2 am. The sitting room is still dark, but there is light left on in the kitchen. John goes in.

The microscope has been put away, and the takeout containers are gone. The chairs are empty, and lined up on the opposite sides of the table. The table itself is wiped clean, and in the middle lies the New Scotland Yard NDA, with Sherlock’s signature at the bottom.


	4. Fine Print

John has been up to many things in the time Sherlock _wasn’t._

They were none of them particularly interesting, or particularly exciting, but that was not a surprise. He’d expected that to be the blueprint of his existence before he met Sherlock, and had resigned himself to it. This was, in essence, no different.

And if the new wound on his heart, the one right there with the wounds left by all the others he buried, all the others he laughed with and fought with and whom he kept from dying through the skill of his eye and the skill of his hand, if that one wound hurt a little bit more, cut a little bit deeper, well. That was to be expected. The fresh ones always did.

*

He stands on the South Bank near the under-croft, looking at a body half-submerged in the receding tide. Rain is falling onto his hair, soaking through his shirt at the back of his neck, and his hands are cold and wet where he’s holding them tight in his pockets.

Down at the edge of the water, his coat heavy on his shoulders and his wet scarf open at the collar, Sherlock circles the body, and the weather might as well not exist. John can see him blinking the rain out of his eyes and wiping his forehead, but Sherlock’s laser focus never wavers. 

John remembers he used to love seeing Sherlock like this.

He can’t quite recall what that should feel like.

Perhaps it’s the weather, he thinks. Perhaps it’s the contrast of the warm office and the cold banks of Thames on a freezing day. Perhaps the creature comforts of the dull and uninteresting life have crept in unnoticed, settled too deep in his bones, and it will take more than one rain-soaked crime scene to pry them back out.

There’s a squelch of boots in the mud.

“Anything?” says Greg. Rain stops falling on John; Greg has brought an umbrella.

John shrugs. “Nothing yet.” He thinks for a moment, then frowns. “He did say something about wireless headphones and exploding goldfish. Does that ring any bells?”

Greg looks at him with a mix of morbid fascination and genuine pleasure on his face.

“No,” he says. “God no. But I wouldn’t be surprised.”

John smiles. “That kind of a case?”

“Well. No, not really. It’s just…” Greg waves his hand. “You know. Sherlock.”

They both look at Sherlock. He is bending over the corpse’s legs now. He’s taken one foot out of the water and pulled off the shoe (an expensive brown oxford, John can see even from here) and is looking at something between the toes.

John thinks about Sherlock’s toes.

Sherlock bedroom was closed last night, and it was still closed in the morning, when John woke up to go to work. John brewed tea, made himself scrambled eggs (discovered the takeout containers had been labelled in blue pen and arranged on the top shelf, tallest in the back, shortest in the front). He didn’t knock on Sherlock’s door, and he didn’t linger past his usual time before he left for the clinic. 

Well, not too much.

He got the text at half past noon, with nothing but the address and the initials.

He was in a cab so fast he didn’t even remember leaving.

When he arrived at the scene, Sherlock had just persuaded a very irritated and a very wet Greg to not move the body under any circumstances, and _for God’s sake, keep the idiots away_ while he slip-staggered down the bank to the edge of the water, murmuring something about goldfish and headphones, and began splashing around to examine the body himself. He didn’t ask John to follow, didn’t even acknowledge his presence.

John would be offended by it, but he finds he doesn’t have the will. When the tail end of anger burned out at the mantelpiece last night, and the calmness settled into his chest, he was expecting—

He doesn’t know what he was expecting. The excitement, probably. The battlefield of London, returning, blazing across his senses and making him want to run and chase and laugh at the top of his lungs.

Instead, he stuffs his cold wet hands into his pockets, and watches Sherlock peer between the toes of a dead man washed up on the freezing bank of a sluggish river. He can’t help but think about Sherlock’s own bare feet propped on the arm of the sofa, when Sherlock slept the sleep of the dead without knowing John was falling into a chasm not ten feet away. He can’t help but think about Sherlock’s bare feet on the floor in the kitchen, when Sherlock took off his dressing gown and his t-shirt and John could count the ribs under his skin even if he weren’t a doctor.

A thought occurs to him. He turns to Greg. “Drugs?”

Greg is still looking at Sherlock, who has let one of the corpse’s feet fall back into the water, and is now examining the other. “Could be. Wealthy family, obviously, with these shoes—”

“I don’t mean him.”

Greg is silent for a long moment.

“Tested negative last week,” he says at last. Then he frowns. “He’s not using now, is he?”

John shakes his head. “No. Just cigarettes. But I meant before. Last year. A test is only good for ninety days, and he cut his hair, so.” He hesitates. Six years ago, that’s quite a long while. Priorities change. He clears his throat. “Would he still tell you?”

Greg’s sighs. “Perhaps. I don’t know.” They both look at Sherlock again. He seems to have found something, and is examining the toenails of the victim through his magnifying lens. Rain keeps falling down on it, and he keeps wiping it, and his face says he won’t be inconvenienced by a mere torrential downpour.

“Look, John,” Greg says. “I don’t know anything for sure, but if I were to guess… and mind you, I am really just guessing…” He trails off, sighs, but says nothing after that.

“Yeah,” says John. “Yeah, I know.”

The rain picks up, the wind sending the water sideways in sharp, freezing gusts. 

Greg shudders. “Okay. I’m heading back. Too cold for my old bones. Wave if you need anything, all right? We’re ready to pick up the body whenever he’s done. Here, hang onto this.” He gives John his umbrella, and then turns on his heel and squelches back to the squad car. From the passenger seat, Sally gives John a terse smile.

John turns back to look at Sherlock, who has straightened up, pulled off his gloves and is now typing something on his mobile. John can’t quite tell from this far away, but he is fairly sure the expression on Sherlock’s face is one of the last stages of deduction. Which means they’re almost done, and John can get out of this weather.

I’ll have to reduce my hours at the clinic, he thinks, watching Sherlock smile at his phone in triumph, then pocket it back, pull his gloves on and start climbing back up the bank. 

I’ll have to get into a better regime of sleep, he thinks, because running in the middle of the night in the freezing rain is again on the table.

I’ll have to get off Chinese, and get Sherlock… well, get Sherlock on _something._

Sherlock stumbles, and falls on the slippery stones.

John is next to him within the space of a breath, knees digging into the ground and fingers digging into wet wool, and he doesn’t even remember crossing the distance between there and here. He holds Sherlock’s arm, and pulls him up, and they’re both vertical again, rain sheeting sideways into their eyes. John puts his hand on Sherlock’s back to steady him, and Sherlock flinches away with a hiss.

John steps back, opens his hands and holds them up.

Sherlock looks at him. His eyes dart between John’s hands, then back to his face. He scowls. “Oh, for God’s sake, John, don’t be an idiot.”

Then he turns and climbs the rest of the way, unassisted.

He is favouring his right leg. John lowers his hands and climbs up after him, watching Sherlock’s every step.

*

The ankle is sprained. It’s mild, but it starts bruising by the time they get home. Sherlock insists on walking up the seventeen stairs by himself, but he gives up at number five, and elects to rely on John as his personal walking stick, rather than descend to the indignity of clutching the railing.

In the sitting room, John guides him to the sofa, tells him to elevate the foot and goes to get a cold compress and bandages. When he comes back, Sherlock is caught in a complicated manoeuver of trying to shed his coat, remove his shoe and send a text at the same time.

John walks up and plucks the mobile from hand. “Ah, no. First things first.”

Sherlock huffs. “Fine. Type and send the following three—”

“I’m not typing anything.” John pockets the mobile, and sits on the coffee table.

“A murderer is getting away, John.”

“Well, you can’t exactly chase him in this state, can you?”

Sherlock doesn’t reply. He untangles himself from his coat and scarf, drops them onto the floor, and then bends, reaches around John and deftly pickpockets his mobile back. He immediately resumes texting.

John shakes his head. He takes off Sherlock’s shoe and pulls off the sock. 

Sherlock’s skin in soft, and cold, warming up where the swelling is beginning to cushion the slender bones of his foot. John examines the injury. The sprain is mild, grade one, standard inversion with no ligaments torn, but enough to impede Sherlock’s mobility for a week or so.

Damn it. 

“Lie back. Elevate this and stay that way.”

Sherlock keeps texting, but he stretches out on the sofa and props his feet up. John listens for the hiss, watches for the twist of the lip when Sherlock settles on his back – but Sherlock has his eyes fixed on the little screen and he doesn’t make any sounds. John bandages the ankle tight, then wraps the cold compress around it, and sets Sherlock’s leg back down. He stands.

He’s at the door when Sherlock finally tears himself away from the phone.

“Where are you going?”

“Back to work.”

Sherlock looks surprised. No, John corrects himself – hurt. Sherlock looks hurt, for the briefest second, before his expression smoothes out into a careful blank.

“Hm,” is all he says before he returns to texting. And then, just before John closes the door, “We haven’t any milk.”

*

John doesn’t go back to work. He goes to the supermarket, buys milk, and then he wanders down the aisles and picks random things into his cart. He has a vague sense of what to do next: he could cook, he could order out, he could write up the Exploding Goldfish case on his blog. Or he could drop off the groceries and finish off the night in the pub.

He could do all these things, while Sherlock realizes the obvious and begins to plan ways to impede John’s ability to go to work every morning for the next two weeks, so John can play his personal valet instead. John could do all these things, and it won’t change anything – Sherlock will be moored to the flat whether John wants it or not, and Sherlock moored to the flat means return to the status quo from before—

Well, from before John persuaded him to go out.

John wonders for a moment whether Sherlock intended to slip and fall on the riverbank today. Whether this, too, was planned and premeditated and mapped out.

He finds himself standing in the seafood section, looking at a row of frozen fish.

And he gets an idea.

*

“What is this?”

John smiles and stirs the stew with a wooden spoon. “Can’t you tell?”

“Smells like vomit.”

John smiles wider.

It’s early evening. Sherlock has awakened from his hibernation on the sofa. He didn’t stir when John came back from the shop. His mobile was on the coffee table, and the cold compress had melted and slid to the floor. John picked it up, watched Sherlock’s face for a minute, noted the steady pulse beating under the skin of his neck, and went over to the kitchen.

“Fish stew,” he says now, stirring slowly. He turns the burner to low and opens the cupboard.

“Fish.” Sherlock says. “Why on earth would you make fish?”

“I like cooking.” John takes out a bowl, sets it on the counter. “I cooked for myself rather a lot this past year. It’s economical.”

“Only if you’re good at it.”

John hums. “Well, yes. Yes it is.”

He lays a spoon next to the bowl and goes to take the bread out of the freezer.

There’s a rustle from behind him, an aborted hiss, and then Sherlock limps over into the kitchen. He looks into the pot, makes a face.

“So this is what you’re going to do,” he says.

John puts the bread in the microwave and begins punching numbers. “Do what?”

“Cook smelly things in our kitchen until I go out again?”

John’s fingers freeze on the keypad. Well, so much for his brilliant plan.

Sherlock shoots him a crooked smile, and then he turns round and shuffles off to his bedroom. He’s not stepping on his left foot, but uses furniture to get himself from point A to point B. It looks rather ridiculous. John turns on the microwave with a sigh and resolves to bring a set of crutches from the clinic tomorrow.

He’s transferred the bread from the microwave to the oven and is waiting for it to crisp when Sherlock emerges from his bedroom again, limping along the wall. He is holding a bottle of wine in his hand.

John looks at the wine. Somehow, he manages not to say, ‘You have wine in your _bedroom_?’ and instead says, “I thought you didn’t like fish.”

“Anything goes down with a good vintage.” Sherlock throws things around in a drawer, finds a bottle opener. He cuts the foil, screws the opener in and pops out the cork. He turns to the cupboards, but John intercepts him.

“Let me.” He takes out two wineglasses. Sherlock limps over with the bottle and plants himself in a chair, and John sets the glasses in front of him on the table.

Sherlock pours the wine, carefully measuring equal amounts. “You’ve done this before.” 

John smiles. “Of course. Otherwise I wouldn’t be any good at—oh.” He looks at Sherlock. 

Sherlock looks up at him. Poker face.

John folds his arms. “We are not talking about my cooking now, are we?”

Sherlock smiles the faintest of smiles. He peers closely at the levels of wine, then, satisfied, sets the bottle on the table and picks up one glass. “Well, if your cooking is as good as your whipping, then I am very much looking forward to this dinner.”

John looks at him. He can hear the pot bubbling behind him, the fluorescent light making a fizzing sound overhead. Sherlock swirls the wine, then closes his eyes and takes a whiff. John is transfixed by the flare of his nostrils, by the movement of his wrist, by the curl of his fingers around the bowl of the glass.

The mark on the inside of Sherlock’s wrist is still there, a stark contrast to his pale skin.

The oven pings.

“That would be the bread,” says Sherlock, eyes closed.

John blinks, shakes his head. He takes out the bread, brings a board and a sharp knife, and sets them in front of Sherlock. He gets another bowl, and fills both with stew, not paying attention to equal amounts. 

Sherlock cuts the bread. John sets down the bowls and sits at the table.

They don't toast. Sherlock hands him a slice of bread and they eat in silence.

The food is good enough. The wine is superb. For a man who doesn’t indulge in alcohol that often, Sherlock sure knows his stuff. It must be the upbringing. The same which gave John his knowledge of cooking, gave Sherlock his knowledge of wine. They really do have a complementary arrangement.

Sherlock closes his eyes when he eats, so John is free to watch him. Despite his earlier comments on the merits of fish, Sherlock eats like he hasn’t eaten in forever, like this is his first and last meal rolled into one. He cuts more bread, knife breaking the crust with a satisfying crunch, and he pours more wine into his glass, and then into John’s glass without asking. 

“So what else have you done?”

John looks up. Sherlock is looking at him, sipping the wine. John notes the shape of his mouth, the curl of his lip. Interested. Expectant.

He takes a spoonful of stew, chews and swallows. “I could be wrong,” he says. “But I think that would be private.”

“Not since you started doing it with me, it’s not,” says Sherlock. “Although I suppose it’s now private between us. I wouldn’t want you to go bragging about this to Lestrade or Mrs Hudson, for instance, or Molly—”

“What? Hold on a minute,” says John. 

“—God knows you don’t want to give her ideas—”

“Sherlock—”

“—and she does have a talent for picking the difficult sort of man.”

“Hold on, all right? Started? We haven’t _started_ doing anything.”

Sherlock raises his eyebrows. “You mean you don’t plan to discipline me on a regular basis?”

The word rolls off Sherlock’s tongue so easy, but there’s a glint in his eye like he’s having fun, and John sees through it without even trying. He points at Sherlock with his spoon.

“We haven’t started doing anything. And you are well aware that this was a one-time thing, so stop pretending otherwise.”

_And stop trying to take ownership of what wasn’t your doing._

Sherlock looks at him. “But it relaxes you,” he points out. “It helped, John. You haven’t thought about hurting me even once today – well, you thought about the effects of last night, obviously, and you’ve been looking at me for signs of discomfort – but you haven’t thought about punching me, not even when I made you stand in that rain like an idiot. And see?” He makes a sweeping gesture at the table. “You even cooked just now. As methods go, this one yielded superb results, so that warrants at least one more experiment, don’t you think?”

John stares at him.

Experiment. Of course.

Idiot, idiot, such an idiot. Of course it’s a bloody experiment. What else in the world would it be? What else would there be in this for Sherlock, if not a new, exciting adventure that he can pick apart, catalogue, and memorise for future application in cases. 

_A little more on the left there, John. Yes, that’s it, there goes a good chap._

John feels his left hand tingle, deep inside the knot of his wrist. He picks up his spoon, and jabs it into his food without another word.

They eat in silence for a little while.

“John,” says Sherlock, and John reluctantly looks up.

Sherlock is running his fingers around the rim of his glass. “It does hurt, if you want to know.” Their eyes meet, and the playfulness in Sherlock’s expression takes a turn towards something darker. “We’ll have to pick a different area next time, or wait before it heals; or I suppose we could do a sort of round-robin—”

“No,” says John, with force. “There isn’t going to be a next time.”

Sherlock smiles, continues to circle the rim of his glass. He’s wet his fingers in the wine, and the glass is beginning to emit a clear sound. “Not even if I misbehave?”

John tightens his fist around the handle of his spoon. The tingling won’t go away.

“Stop,” he warns. “Just. Don’t.”

Sherlock lifts his fingers. The sound stops. He smiles at John, lazy-cat smile of someone who just got his way. Then he picks up his spoon and digs into the remains of his stew. “Tell me what else you’ve done.”

Like a moth, circling and circling the flame, and it won’t go away. John unclenches his teeth. “You mean you can’t tell by the way I cook my fish?”

Sherlock laughs. “Touché. Well done.” He takes a bite of his bread. Sharp, sharp teeth. “Fine, then. My turn.” He tips the last of his wine into his mouth, and then sets the glass down and sits back, folds his fingers under his chin. His eyes are bright.

“You’ve done this before,” says Sherlock, “but not with any regularity, and not since you invalidated out of the army. You’ve done it mostly with women, which is logical – women enjoy being on this end statistically more often than men – but immaterial in my case, as I don’t consider myself statistically relevant anyway. In _any_ statistics. So yes, you’ve done this before, most probably in a sexual context – I’m afraid statistics are again not in your favour – but not for your own sexual gratification. Your partner’s – yes, obviously – but not for yourself. And that is interesting, you see, that you don’t derive sexual pleasure from the act, but rather… ohhh. Oh, that’s right. You get your adrenaline spike from it, and that’s fine, you need that, but the pleasure you get from what comes after. The soothing, the healing, the aftercare. That is…obvious, really, I should have seen that right off. But this part is not sexual for you. Tell me, John, is there space for a shag between the belt and the hydrogen peroxide? Or do you leave them alone with an icepack while you go get off somewhere else? You can stop choking that spoon now.”

John looks down at his hand. The spoon handle is making an imprint in his palm. He relaxes his fingers, lays the utensil next to his empty bowl. Aligns it. Then he looks up at Sherlock, who is still smiling, teeth still too sharp, eyes still too bright.

“Aren’t you going to ask me how I know?” says Sherlock, pleasantly.

John watches him for a little while. He takes in Sherlock’s expression, the angle of his head, the shape of his hands. He takes it in, and processes it, and he knows.

Sherlock is playing with him. Smoke and mirrors. The loneliness is a facsimile of a human emotion, the fear a trick of the light, wishful thinking. John never held anything in his hand, his power over Sherlock is just an illusion.

He was never worth enough to warrant a wink of an eye before everything went to hell, an unsigned postcard from the end of the world before he wrote down his list, or even a brief visit to the flat in Kensington before he found out from the telly.

And Sherlock does like to be so dramatic.

John stands up, lets his chair screech inelegantly on the floor. He is contained, he won’t be provoked. The white-edged anger is back where it was, but the punch Sherlock obviously wants won’t be coming, not now and not ever. 

And John delights, absolutely delights in what he can say next, so much that it rolls off his tongue like honey.

“Piss off.”

And then he turns round and goes upstairs without looking back.


	5. Such Great Heights

Everyone has things they do in private they wouldn’t exactly want to shout from the rooftops, and John doesn’t fancy himself an exception. 

Informed consent. Stated rules of engagement. There is nothing he would ever allow himself to do without those. Pleasure is more easily obtained, the social contract around it better defined. Pain, even though as ancient and pervasive as pleasure, is still somewhat a taboo. Certain circles—John is aware of certain circles, but he has no interest in becoming career.

So he isn’t exactly vanilla when it comes to the bedroom, so what? With Sherlock, the sexual aspect doesn’t even enter into the picture. John is not a zero on the Kinsey scale, he’s known that for years, but Sherlock isn’t really anything – in this, as in everything else, he defies explanations.

Sherlock consented. That is the bottom line. He consented, but now, since Sherlock does nothing half-way, he wants to dig deeper, rip out the interior, and dissect it, every last private bit of John he can touch with his elegant fucking fingers.

John has had quite enough of being dissected. 

*

Next day, he stays at the clinic past closing. He finishes his paperwork with mind-numbing precision, then shuffles through his pile of always-to-do medical journals, picks one at random, and reads it from start to finish. It bores him to tears.

Emily comes in around eight, brings him coffee. Black, no sugar. He takes it. Thanks her. She smiles, and John thinks about her on her knees in his bedroom, back exposed and arms shaking, hands gripping the footboard, her soft voice hardened with command, egging him on. He blinks, shakes it off. Remembers Josh the new nurse, who is apparently so much fitter than John, and briefly wonders whether he really should lay off the carbs.

Then he smiles, and flirts unashamedly with her, just to see how far he can get.

It takes him less than thirty seconds to realize Josh whoever-he-is doesn’t stand half a chance. In his mind’s eye, the Emily on her knees turns around, and smiles at him with all her teeth.

The Emily in his office smiles too, and twirls a lock of her hair.

John stumbles, breaks their back-and-forth, and bids her an abrupt good night. She looks surprised, and a bit disappointed, but she retreats without protest.

When she’s gone, John sits down and stares into space for a moment. He feels ill.

*

He comes home late for the next few days, and for the first two manages to avoid Sherlock altogether. He knows that if he comes near Sherlock again, Sherlock will see every picture in his head as if John were telegraphing it in bright Technicolor. He can imagine very clearly Sherlock limping into the clinic, taking one look at Emily, and laying down John’s sordid little fantasy bare before her, before Josh-the-fit-nurse, and a roomful of revolted patients to match.

But Sherlock does not come into the clinic. He texts John a few times, something about the leg and the milk and where did John put the Bunsen burner. John ignores him. Eventually Sherlock shuts up.

John goes through his entire backlog of articles, finds a conference he might want to go to in April. He doesn’t reduce his hours, and he doesn’t bring Sherlock the crutches. He remembers about them, every evening when he leaves, and then he makes himself forget.

Mrs Hudson ambushes him one morning in the kitchen, all but demanding he spend more time in the flat now that Sherlock is injured.

“—and he hasn’t left the sofa, poor thing, and the cigarettes, maybe you could—”

“Stop whining, Mrs Hudson,” says Sherlock from the sitting room, in a voice that brooks no argument. “John is busy.”

“Oh, right,” she says, quickly. “Silly me, the flu season, of course. Off you go, don’t mind me, I’ll just get this plate right here—” 

She cleans up the remains of Sherlock’s breakfast and evacuates to the downstairs. John finishes his coffee, throws on his jacket and leaves for work. He doesn’t say a word to Sherlock, and Sherlock doesn’t say a word to him.

Eventually, John thinks, thumping down the stairs, one of them will have to snap.

And John is fairly certain that it won’t be him. He’s had sixteen months of practice.

*

He is eating lunch (another vending machine sandwich, and a coffee he got for himself, since he managed to avoid Emily all day as well), when his phone vibrates in his pocket. He sets the coffee on his desk.

_The Landmark. Top floor. Come at once. –SH._

He stares at the text. It’s the first one in three days. Sherlock is either genuinely in need of his assistance or he’s devised some scheme to break their stalemate. Either way, he’s managed to get himself all the way to Canary Wharf and on top of an apartment building with no help from John.

John realises he doesn’t know whether Sherlock is mobile yet. He hasn’t seen Sherlock move around the flat since the fish stew dinner, and he hasn’t checked on the foot, because it would involve being in close scrutiny distance. If he diagnosed this right – and John knows he diagnosed this right – Sherlock should either be horizontal with his ankle in a splint, or in a world of pain every time he tried to stand on two feet.

He looks at the crutches in the corner of his office, under the far wall.

The phone vibrates again.

_Murder. Very mysterious. Your assistance required. –SH._

The crutches sit there like they’re making a point, and suddenly John feels completely ridiculous.

What in God’s name is he doing? He is a goddamn _doctor_ , and Sherlock is _injured_ , and, invasive comments notwithstanding, Sherlock is still his _friend_. Jesus Christ.

He finishes the sandwich in three quick bites and washes it down with the last of the coffee.

He is closing his office door and on his way to cancel all of his remaining appointments when the phone in his hand vibrates again.

_Bring chips. –SH._

*

The murder remains mysterious for the half an hour it takes John to get to Canary Wharf. When he does get there, Greg’s team is just wrapping up, and Sherlock is sitting on the unmade bed in the little studio flat on the 44th floor, staring at the rug with a far-away look.

Sherlock never sits on furniture at crime scenes.

He looks up when John comes in. “You didn’t bring chips.”

_Yeah, sorry, already had lunch_ , John thinks, because the last five days are hard to turn off, but he stops himself and instead manages to say, “How’s your leg?”

Sherlock looks at him. His eyes dart over John’s face: a split-second, skin-deep scrutiny; an assessment of will. “It’s fine.” He returns to staring at the rug.

John wanders around the room. Looks outside, down the impossible drop. Some people like to live like this, inside the clouds and the rain. John prefers to be closer to the ground. The beauty of the view is breath-taking, but the awareness of the empty space sends a chill down his spine.

Stepping out would be just so easy.

“Hey,” says Greg. “We’re leaving. If you have anything, now is the t—Where’s he got to?”

John turns away from the window. The bed is empty. Greg is standing next to it, hands on hips.

“He was just here,” says John.

“Sherlock? Anybody seen Sherlock?” Greg addresses the room.

“He stepped out,” says someone from the corridor. “I think he went to the stairway.”

“I’ll get him,” says John.

The stairs are quiet, and there is no one at the lower landings, so John climbs up. The door at the top is unlocked. He pushes it open and steps out onto the roof.

The wind bites colder up here than on the street. London stretches underneath in its endless sprawl, and the grey sky surrounds him on all sides. John hunches into his coat and steps onto the gravel. He looks round.

*

Later, he will remember this moment in slow motion, as you do when something dreadful is about to happen, and your brain already knows what, and engages all the defence mechanisms it has acquired through ages of evolution.

John had moments like this during deployment, when there wasn’t enough time to react, but enough time to observe. Premonition. Crystal clarity of thought.

He also had moments when everything unfolded in split-seconds and ended in blackness, and he would wake up afterwards to find about the events through other people’s accounts.

He vastly prefers the latter.

*

John hunches into his coat, steps on the gravel and looks round. The wind bites, the grey sky rolls over London, and twenty feet away, Sherlock is standing at the very edge of the roof, with his back to John, looking down at the forty-four storey drop.

John’s legs give out softly, without warning. The world tilts down, John’s back hits a hard surface, and then he’s looking at the sky from the perspective of gravel. He has a vague feeling of his feet touching something solid, but then the nerves in his limbs refuse to respond and he doesn’t register anything else. He is floating. There is blackness eating at the London sky at the rim of his vision.

Reality stops making sense. He blacks out.

*

Sherlock’s face. Sherlock’s eyes. Sherlock’s mouth, moving, no sound coming out.

_Why are you shouting at me?_ thinks John. _I was sleeping._

“John! John, are you all right?”

But this is not Sherlock. Ah, wishful thinking. This is Greg.

Greg is kneeling under the grey London sky, and he grabs John by the shoulders and helps him to a sitting position.

“I’m fine,” says John, from inside the cocoon of his head. “I’m fine. Low blood sugar. I’m fine.”

“You don’t look fine,” says Greg. “The ambulance is on the way. Stay where you are. Or. Well. Maybe move a few inches over to your left, if you can.”

John frowns. The world is still not making sense. His head feels like a ball of foam floating on water.

Greg motions to the right, and John turns. 

There’s a body of a man, propped up against the stairwell exit, right next to where John is sitting. The colouring suggests he died within the past six hours. There are no visible wounds except a long dark scratch on his cheek.

“At least you found him,” says Greg. “Defensive wounds look like a match. We’ll get samples to the lab, but I’m pretty sure this is the murderer.”

John needs to swallow two times before he can ask.

“Where is he?”

Greg looks away. “Took off. Barged back into the flat, told us to come up here, and then left.” He looks at John, and the lines on his face say _worry_ , but his eyes say it’s much deeper than that.

“Look, John,” says Greg, voice low. “I know this is none of my business, but—If there’s something going on with him—With you two—If there’s anything I can do to help. You know you just say it, right?”

John nods. “We’re fine,” he says. “We’ll be fine.”

“Like your blood sugar?” says Greg. But he stands up, and leaves John alone.

John could argue with him, but he is getting cold. Maybe it’s the wind, and the chill. Maybe it really is the blood sugar.

He closes his eyes, and waits for the ambulance to arrive.

*

When he gets to the flat four hours later, hydrated and running on fresh carbohydrates, the sky is already turning dark. There are no lights in the flat, and he comes up the stairs half-wishing Sherlock were still out somewhere, but he knows that is not going to happen.

His anger is clear-cut like crystal, diamond-focussed. He had time to think, strapped to the IV bag in the A&E, and the conclusion is obvious. What remains to be seen is what Sherlock will do, now that he has John pinned under the glass like an insect.

John comes into the kitchen, and goes through the mechanics: he takes off his jacket and hangs it carefully on the back of the door. He takes off his shoes and sets them out on the landing next to Sherlock’s. Then he walks over to the sitting room and switches on the lamp in the corner.

Sherlock is meditating on the sofa, eyes closed, hands folded together on his chest. He is wearing his suit from earlier today: black jacket, pressed trousers, white shirt open at the collar. His feet are bare, left ankle wrapped in an elastic bandage. He looks like he’s been waiting for hours, and he very clearly isn’t asleep.

John walks up to him on quiet feet, and stops. Ah, of course. Insect, meet tweezers.

He relaxes, breathes out through his open mouth, lets the complicated wave of heat and nerves pass through him, and fade into calm. He is ready.

On the coffee table, displayed like an offering on top of the books and newspapers and a pile of New Scotland Yard folders, lies Sherlock’s riding crop.


	6. Sanity 101

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Those warnings I mentioned in the first chapter? Well, here's some more.

“If I ask you why you want to do this, you’ll either tell me the truth, or you’ll make up a very convincing lie. Either way it’s going to sound the same to me, so. I’m not asking.”

He turns the riding crop in his hands. Black, woven leather, solid wood handle, long body and a small, narrow tip. It has heft. John tries it out on his thigh. It stings, even through the jeans. This is no flimsy toy.

He hasn’t used a crop in a while. He does much better with belts.

He looks at Sherlock stretched out on the sofa.

Sherlock didn’t move an inch from his meditative sprawl when John came into the room. He didn’t bat an eyelid when John picked up the crop, but the tension in his body tells John he is listening. 

John clears his throat. “There are rules to this, Sherlock. And if you think that’s beneath you, then I don’t care, and this stops now. _Look_ at me when I’m talking.”

Sherlock opens his eyes and slowly turns his head to John. Poker face, but eyes attentive. _Intent._

“Good,” says John. He swallows. “We do this where you’re most comfortable, this doesn’t change. When I think you’ve had enough, we stop, and you don’t argue. When you think you’ve had enough, you tell me. And if, by some unfathomable miracle, you change your mind, you tell me right away. Do you understand?”

Sherlock looks at him for a moment, then cocks an eyebrow. “I don’t get a safeword?”

John thinks this over. “No. We’re not playing with words. Use your English.”

“Is that all?”

“Yes.”

Sherlock inclines his head. “Very well. Where do you want me?”

“Not very good at this rules thing, are you?”

Sherlock looks him straight in the eye, then grins. “Just checking.” He unfolds from the sofa, and starts towards the kitchen. He doesn’t limp anymore, but doesn’t put all of his weight on his left foot either. John watches him disappear in the bedroom, then turns round, draws the curtains, locks the doors to the landing, and follows.

When he walks in, Sherlock is standing with his back to the door, unbuttoning his shirt. His suit jacket is lying on the perfectly made bed, the lamp on the nightstand is on, and the curtain is drawn on the little back window. Muted streetlamp light shines through it.

Sherlock throws the shirt onto the bed and puts his hands on the wall on the far side of the window. John remembers there used to be a mirror there, and maybe some pictures, he can’t recall which ones. There is nothing there now, the corner dark and empty. Sherlock leans against the bare wall, and plants his feet. 

His back is a patchwork of fading purple and blue, narrow stripes going green at the edges. The oldest bruises, the ones from before, are barely visible shades of yellow at the back of his neck. 

John swallows. “Sherlock. Put your shirt back on.”

Sherlock shoots him a look over his shoulder. “You agreed,” he says, sharp. “You said—”

John raises his hand, and Sherlock snaps his mouth shut.

“No,” says John, gently. “You misunderstand. Let me rephrase, okay?” He clears his throat. “We are going to do this, but I’m not going to layer it on, so you may keep your shirt if you don’t want to get cold.”

He waits for a little while, letting that sink in. Sherlock gets it in one, if the tension in his shoulders is anything to go by, but he seems to think about the shirt for a moment. At last, he takes his hands off the wall and unbuttons his trousers. He hooks his thumbs into his waistband, hesitates.

Kinsey nothing, thinks John. This is not about sex.

Sherlock slides his trousers and pants down, kicks them off, and returns to his position by the wall. The lines of his back and legs are long and graceful, all the way down; well-sculpted muscles, standing out sharp and wiry on his thinner frame. His left foot is bandaged from the instep to halfway up the calf; a professional pressure wrap.

“Very good,” says John. He flexes his hands on the crop handle, and steps closer, stops an arm’s length from Sherlock’s right shoulder. “Ready when you are,” he says.

“One,” says Sherlock immediately.

John strikes.

The crop connects with a snap, and Sherlock lets out an explosive breath, muffles the sound of it between his teeth. He doesn’t lose his balance this time, even though this is a level up from the belt – and John has to wonder, against his better judgement, if Sherlock has tried this before. 

“Two,” says Sherlock, too fast, and John obediently lays another one across his buttocks. Sherlock doesn’t quite manage to muffle the sound this time, though not for the lack of trying. He wrenches his head to the side, presses his face into his left biceps. 

John lets his hand drop to his side.

This won’t do, he thinks. It will not make sense if Sherlock keeps everything compressed like this.

He turns round, walks over and closes the bedroom door. He turns the key in the lock. When he comes back, Sherlock is looking at him over his shoulder, eyes dark under his fringe. John returns to position, meets Sherlock’s gaze.

Sherlock turns his face to the wall again, cranes his neck, left then right, and says, “Three.”

He doesn’t suppress the sound on the next strike, or the ones after that. They come out short and torn, sharp cut-off cries, like there’s something lodged in his diaphragm, and he can’t force it out. The counterpoint to the crack of the leather is hypnotizing, and John feels himself falling into the rhythm again.

This could work, he thinks, taking careful aim at the tops of Sherlock’s thighs. Sherlock was right, he is always bloody right, even in this.

This could work, he thinks, watching Sherlock take another blow with finesse, listening to his voice break and catch, and continue to throw out numbers, up, up, and up.

This could work, he thinks, and then, _Jesus Christ, what am I doing?_

“John.”

He swings, stops himself at the last moment when he realises that wasn’t a number. He lowers his arm, but he doesn’t let go of the crop.

“All right?” he says. God, but his mouth is dry.

“Yes,” says Sherlock. His voice is quiet, strung out. “John. You should leave now.”

John frowns. “Are you—”

“Yes, yes. Please leave.”

John throws the crop on the bed and turns on his heel. As he unlocks the door, he hears Sherlock slide down the wall and fall to his knees.

*

And this, this is the moment when, in hindsight, he should have turned tail and run.

But he didn’t, he doesn’t and he never will. Whether by habit, by need, or by the desire to finish the ritual that’s already been started – he doesn’t know. Either way he is tethered to Sherlock whether he wants it or not. He is lost, co-dependent, and utterly pathetic, and he will follow this man anytime, anywhere, come hell or high water or a bullet to the head.

*

He opens the door, goes out into the hallway and into the bathroom. He doesn’t turn on the light; doesn’t need to, he knows the layout by heart. He takes a towel from the hook by the bathtub, soaks it in cold water, and wrings it out. He turns off the tap and goes back to the bedroom.

He stops dead in the doorway.

Sherlock is kneeling where he fell, his back half-turned to the door. He is holding himself up with his left hand braced against the far wall, and at first John’s brain can’t quite process the flex of Sherlock’s right arm, the roll of his shoulder.

And when it does, John turns round where he stands and goes back to the bathroom.

He stands there for a little while, looking at the outline of his own head in the mirror, backlit by the light from the sitting room. He listens to the sounds Sherlock is making; small, tight sounds, like he doesn’t want John to hear but can’t stop himself. John waits until the sounds crest, and cease, and then he grabs another towel, puts it under warm water, wrings it and goes back to the bedroom. 

He closes the door. Sherlock is still kneeling, so John comes up to him and goes down too. When he touches Sherlock’s shoulder, Sherlock flinches like he’s been kicked.

“No,” Sherlock slurs. “No. I said leave.”

“Yeah,” says John. “And I said my terms.”

He takes the warm towel, wraps it around Sherlock’s right hand, and carefully cleans his palm and between his fingers. Then he touches the towel to Sherlock’s stomach – neutral territory, signalling slow movement south – and when he isn’t hindered, he moves the towel down and cleans Sherlock there too. Sherlock watches him with unfocussed eyes. His lower lip is swollen, bitten red.

John drops the towel, hooks his arm under Sherlock’s. “Come on up.” Sherlock rises with him, and lets John guide him to the bed. His coordination is poor, but he doesn’t fall, just folds himself slowly on top of the covers. John guides him over to his front. Sherlock turns his head away, into the cradle of his folded arms. He breathes out a slow sigh, but doesn’t say anything.

John inspects the bruising, then spreads the cold towel from Sherlock’s lower back to his thighs, presses the soft fabric gently to the heated skin. There is no blood and the crop only wrapped twice, no more than he intended – he is rather good at this, despite being all out of practice. He sits at Sherlock’s side for a while, listening to him breathe. Sherlock doesn’t speak, doesn’t acknowledge John’s presence. His fingers twitch, minutely, and John watches the inside of Sherlock’s wrist, where his pulse beats strong and slow.

The mark on Sherlock’s skin stands out sharp there, unnatural in the soft lamplight, and John’s brain throws up a diagnosis without engaging higher function at all.

Cigarette burn, six months old.

John stops breathing.

The mark is a perfect circle; no sharp edge, not a crescent. Not an accident, then; a prolonged exposure. A deliberate application of heat, for an extended period of time. 

John draws in a slow breath, and closes his eyes. He thinks of Sherlock smoking cigarettes by the window. He thinks of Sherlock putting the cigarette to his skin so that it perfectly matches the circle. He thinks of the flesh burning away, and Sherlock not making a sound.

But he must have made a sound. A burn like this, the _knowledge_ that it’s happening… He must have made a sound.

Sherlock shifts, rearranging his arms and moving his head to the other side, face towards John and the light. John twitches away, on instinct, but Sherlock’s eyes are closed, and his face is relaxed. Blank.

Sherlock is in the Mind Palace. John might as well be on a different planet right now.

He blinks. The image of Sherlock, silent at the open window with a burning cigarette, won’t go away.

He gathers himself, stands. He picks up the towel from the floor, slings it over his shoulder, and tucks the riding crop under his arm. He picks up and folds Sherlock’s trousers and lays them on a chair along with Sherlock’s underwear. He carries the crop to the kitchen, leaves it on the table, drops the towel in the laundry basket, and fills a water glass. He gets two ibuprofen and carries them and the water back to the bedroom, sets them on the nightstand next to Sherlock’s head. Then he turns off the lamp, closes the bedroom door, gets rubbing alcohol and soap, and sits at the kitchen table to clean out the crop.

*

Sherlock might have come back thin as a rake and with his mop shorn off, but he doesn’t need to be near John 24/7 to read the lack of sleep in the little tells John carries around on his face.

John and melatonin have become fast friends. He takes it because he is a doctor and he won’t take regular sleeping pills, thank you very much. He knows what regular sleeping pills can do.

He knows what he could do with the sleeping pills.

They used to be on the list.

*

He lies in bed for two hours before he decides that sleep is not on the menu. The clock at the bedside tells him it’s nearly midnight. He is a little bit woozy from his late-evening dose, but it goes away when he gets out of bed, so he gets dressed again and goes back downstairs. Sherlock’s bedroom door is still closed, and the crop is still lying on the kitchen table where John left it after he was done cleaning. 

He listens for a while in the hallway, holding his breath, and then he puts on his shoes and his jacket and goes out.

He touches down in a pub a short walk away, gets himself a pint and sits at the bar with an expression that he hopes discourages conversation. He needs time to think, and time away from Sherlock. Upstairs bedroom is not conducive to thinking – he spends too much time listening for echoes in the vents.

He drinks his beer, and dissects what he knows into small, manageable pieces.

Sherlock is a genius, a show-off, and a self-diagnosed sociopath. He successfully alienates all people but the select few, and even that is a feat of their own tireless patience. He likes to be dramatic, is a recovering addict, and detests boredom above everything else.

But he is not a sexual creature. The Irene Adler incident told John as much. Emotions – yes, the dreaded sentiment – yes, and more than Sherlock would ever like to admit. Love, or a certain level of infatuation – maybe so; with Irene, all the signs pointed to a near-adolescent experience, complete with the intense hatred when it all went to hell.

But sex? No. Still doesn’t enter into the picture. John remembers Irene in that wretched robe with next to nothing underneath, taking John’s seat in front of the fireplace and across from Sherlock, who had already drifted off miles away.

“He’s going to talk to me,” John told her through clenched teeth, pulling his jacket on, leaving before the intensity of his anger drowned out his restraint. (Strangling her – _not good._ ) “Don’t mind him. He doesn’t notice that I’m not actually around.”

He knew, going down the seventeen steps, what he was letting her do. He knew that she would try her luck, see how far she could get. And he was willing to let that happen; Sherlock’s well-being was hanging by a thread, and John would make any and all sacrifices to have the torture cease. He would even endure the dreadful woman and all she brought with her. 

He hadn’t known, and Mrs Hudson hadn’t known either, of any past exploits of Sherlock’s. But by then John had seen enough, and, even as he acknowledged his fifth-wheel status and went down the stairs and out of the flat, he reckoned Irene Adler wouldn’t get very far.

He was right. 

It felt damn good to be right.

So how on Earth did he miss this?

He takes a drink, shakes his head. No, this is wrong. Has to be wrong. There are clues, body language everybody on Earth uses whether they like it or not. Sherlock can sham it with the best of them, so he has to know it exists, same as John knows there are things that you just can’t conceal.

Maybe the problem is not at the source, he thinks, maybe it’s in the receiver. He stares down his empty glass. 

Well. There’s one way to find out.

*

It’s almost half past midnight when he finds the right club in Soho, and closing time is in half an hour. The crowd is thinning, and the level of desperation is rising accordingly. John picks a place at the bar, gets himself another pint (just passing by) and begins to scan the faces.

He realises his mistake in less than a minute, and drowns his embarrassment in the beer – talk about a skewed sample; Sherlock would laugh himself silly at an experiment like this.

Oh, he can spot all the clues all right. In the cauldron of clues you would have to be hit with an earth-to-earth missile to not see things that are so glaringly obvious. It would do much better to get into a mixed crowd, try his luck, and measure success by the lack of a black eye on his face at the end of the evening.

He drinks his beer and thinks about that. His mind is calm – like Sherlock knew it would be; this, John reminds himself, was the bloody _point_ – but his body has already begun to recognize the old pattern, the worn groove of consensual violence, aftercare and sex. There is a hunger awakening in his gut, a low hum in his bones, a need that makes the faces and the bodies in the room light up, makes his eyes follow them like magnets.

He looks his fill. Avoids eye contact, for now – God forbid he end the evening with an accidental plus-one – and he re-examines the old pattern. Does he want to get into that again?

He could. He’s already gone out. Halfway there. Now make eye contact, introduce himself with a minimum of words, walk the short distance back to Baker Street (he really is too old for alleys), up the stairs to his bedroom, undress, and do it right there, with Sherlock sleeping on top of the covers downstairs. 

Would Sherlock wake up?

Would he listen?

_Jesus Christ._ John runs a hand through his hair.

No way around it. He needs to at least consider—

He downs his beer, and stops looking around the room. He concentrates on the green-rimmed coaster under his glass, and makes himself focus.

Slowly, and with great deliberation, he erases the accidental plus-one from the scene of tangled sheets and tangled limbs in his mind, and replaces him with the image of Sherlock. It’s difficult. The tectonic shift from friend and patient to subject was not easy, but this – this is unimaginably hard. Friend to lover. How would Sherlock even react? Jesus, this is impossible. Insane.

_Marble sculpture, bag of blood, flesh and bones, razor-sharp, brilliant mind, lying liar who lies who shattered John’s sanity on that pavement; strong hand in his in the sharp bite of handcuffs, breathless run through the streets, breathless chase, exhilaration and shots ringing in John’s ears, making him dizzy with friendship and happiness and love, so much love he cannot contain all of it in his heart, he could burst at the seams with the fullness of love he has for this man._

Marble headstone.

Sherlock in his bed. Open mouth. Yes. Yes. _John._

John feels himself flush. God, he _wants_ this. He has to breathe through his mouth, and immediately imagines himself sharing Sherlock’s breath, and it’s intoxicating. Unfathomable. _God._

God. He didn’t _know_.

“Another one, mate? Closing time in ten minutes.”

John blinks up. His vision is blurry. Two pints is nothing. He tries to recall when he had something to eat. Ah, he didn’t get dinner; he’s been hydrated and fed by machines.

He clears his throat. “Thanks. Um. No. I’ve got to get going.”

He leaves cash on the table and goes home without looking back.


	7. Still Water

Next morning, he comes downstairs to find Sherlock eating breakfast and reading the paper. It’s Saturday. Sherlock is wearing a suit. Mrs Hudson is rushing about, a breakfast plate is waiting for John at their extremely clean kitchen table, and the riding crop is nowhere to be found.

John says good morning, and then he and Mrs Hudson have a conversation about the sudden disappearance of eggs. Sherlock doesn’t participate, and instead reads his paper in very evocative silence.

After breakfast, Sherlock dons his coat and disappears with a flourish and without a word. John spends the day puttering about the flat, doing nothing. He realises he’s waiting when he checks his phone for the fifth time and frowns at the lack of messages. Eventually, he gives up and goes downstairs to have tea and watch telly with Mrs Hudson.

Sherlock comes back late at night. John is already in bed when he hears footsteps on the stairs. There is a small racket in the kitchen a few minutes later, but John doesn’t go down to check.

On Sunday, they have breakfast next to each other again, and afterwards, it’s John who goes out for a walk. He circles Regent’s park, gets himself a bagel, and feeds ducks for an hour, staring at the sky. He endeavours not to think of anything.

When he comes back, Sherlock is home. They barely acknowledge each other. John makes tea and browses random news on the internet. It depresses him, and reminds him once again why he usually avoids the news. In the evening, he watches a bit of telly – a mindless drone of one period soap opera or another, re-runs of something he’s seen a long time ago.

Sherlock doesn’t change out of his pyjamas. He spends the entire day traversing the path between his bedroom and the kitchen table, which grows increasingly heavy with laboratory equipment and eggshells. He doesn’t share what he’s working on, and John doesn’t ask, although by unspoken agreement they both keep Mrs Hudson away from the kitchen. They order out, and eat separately – Sherlock at the table, and John in front of the telly.

It’s not entirely uncomfortable. It even approaches routine. Except John keeps watching Sherlock for clues and Sherlock keeps not giving any, and as much as John tries not to think of anything, especially leather, some images are impossible to turn off.

It’s selfish to want this mouth. It’s selfish and irresponsible and wrong to want to take what hasn’t been offered, but John's imagination has been given a picture, and it has run off with this picture and is making full coloured copies, and handing them back to John every time he closes his eyes. He has been made weak by wanting, and he can’t make himself stop.

In the kitchen, Sherlock is grinding eggshells into fine powder and not acknowledging John’s existence at all, and this is normal, this is just fine, this is what they do.

*

The following Tuesday, Sherlock texts him at last.

_Cemetery. 4 PM. –SH._

John doesn’t have to ask which cemetery.

They stand shoulder to shoulder in the rainless, cold afternoon and watch as uniformed men remove Sherlock’s headstone, dig up the coffin and take it away in a grey, unmarked van. John would think them bearing witness is a tad sentimental, but Sherlock looks so serious during the proceedings, that John lets it go. Put last year behind them, Sherlock had said. By all means.

Sherlock stands up a little straighter after they leave the grounds, so John takes him out to a pub. Sherlock doesn’t protest. The evening ends with John drinking rather more than he should, and Sherlock being gloomy over a half-finished glass of wine, which is not what John had intended, but he doesn’t mind in the least – it’s the first day he never has to think about Semtex again, and it couldn’t have come too soon.

They end up walking back to the flat, footsteps drunk but synchronized anyway. Sherlock keeps looking up at the sky, and John keeps yanking his arm so he doesn’t walk into lampposts.

“The stars,” says Sherlock, at length. “They’re different in Brazil.”

John smiles. Even moderately sloshed he is better at this than Sherlock will ever be. “Yes. That’s because the Earth is round, Sherlock.”

“Hmm,” says Sherlock, looking up, but offers no other comment. John yanks his arm again. Someone passes by, looks at them like they’re idiots. John grins, sees Sherlock’s mouth curl up at the corners. They walk.

When they get home, Sherlock runs up the stairs – with perfect coordination, John does not fail to notice – and when John climbs up after him and enters the sitting room, Sherlock has already divested himself of his coat and suit jacket, and is kneeling barefoot at the fireplace, shifting the logs.

Flickers of firelight dance against Sherlock’s profile, and the streetlamp glow through the window is soft against the back of his bent neck. John looks at him and imagines sliding his fingers up Sherlock’s nape, curling them in his hair, and making a fist--

He is sober in the space of a breath. He didn’t think it was possible.

He feels the world sway, very gently, but with an unstoppable push. He puts his hand on the doorframe. He is flushed, the tips of his ears are tingling. Sherlock lays the last log down on the fire that’s already crackling and building up high, and then he lays his hands flat on his thighs and looks at the flames, and John clutches the doorframe and does not allow himself to think. No thinking. No imagining. Just _no._

Sherlock chooses this moment to turn round, and meets John’s eyes, and John _knows_ , right then and there, he knows with absolute certainty that Sherlock is doing this on purpose. All of it. The feet, the hands, the angle of his neck. The knees, God, the _knees_. Sherlock is employing a choreography of movement that is guaranteed to bring John exactly where Sherlock wants him to be.

No. _No._ Correction. Not where Sherlock wants him to be – where _John_ wants them both to be, where John’s rampant imagination has chosen to place them. Sherlock had not consented to that, he said no, and John remembers that very clearly.

Sherlock said no. John overwrote his decision. And now Sherlock kneels at the fireplace, exposing the back of his neck, like he’s waiting for teeth or a rope or a collar.

Sherlock is a cacophony of clues.

It takes effort to unglue himself from the doorframe, and it takes iron resolve to turn around and go into the kitchen. As he makes tea, John applies breathing exercises – Ella taught him that months ago; useful for staving off panic attacks. He brews the tea for himself. He doesn’t make one for Sherlock. When he is ready, he takes his cup and goes to the sitting room, a beeline from the kitchen counter to his armchair. Safe at his destination, he risks a look round.

Sherlock has moved on from the fireplace, and is now sitting on the windowsill, sucking on a cigarette. He exhales, lets the smoke swirl out through the open window. The night beyond hums with the steady noise of the city.

John tightens his fingers around the handle of his cup.

He hates the smoking. He abhors it. The new smell has settled into Sherlock’s clothes, clings to his skin and his hair, trails after him when he passes John by in the kitchen. And as much as John would like to accept that _this is Sherlock now_ , he can’t force himself into compliance. Greg might not be sure, but John knows, he _knows_ that this is a substitute, something Sherlock turned to right before he came back, so he would have something to do with his hands, so he wouldn’t drive himself crazy inside his own brain. And as much as John hates himself for feeling like this, he detests it. He detests that Sherlock needs it, that he needs substitutes, amplifiers, _help_. It’s a step into the past, a regression, an undoing of time. 

This Sherlock from six years ago – John is not sure he would have liked to live with him. That he would even like him.

But Sherlock right now? Never smokes when John is in the flat.

John sets his cup slowly on the side table. This, this he can do. Yes. He relaxes his hands. He takes a moment to take a deep breath and square his shoulders, and then he walks over to Sherlock, takes the cigarette out of his fingers and crushes it in the Buckingham Palace ashtray next to Sherlock’s thigh.

“You’re quitting,” he says.

Sherlock looks at him. In the soft glow from the street, his eyes are transparent and calm.

“Am I,” he says, and he sounds amused.

“Yes. Get all of your packs from around the flat and bin them right now.”

Sherlock watches him, unmoving. The expression on his face is half surprise and half fascination, as if he just saw an exotic animal perform some previously unobserved trick. He holds John’s gaze, and then he slowly reaches into his trouser pocket and fishes out his cigarette pack. He shakes one cigarette out into his palm and puts it between his lips. Then he slips the pack into his pocket again, picks up the lighter from the windowsill, and flicks it open.

Sherlock closes his eyes when he lights up, and John takes that moment to watch his mouth, if only because he can.

Sherlock meets his eyes again, the tip of the cigarette flaring up, and John would laugh at the challenge if he weren’t so utterly, hopelessly gone.

He swallows. He can do this. Yes, he can do this, easy.

“What did I say about repeating myself, Sherlock?” His voice sounds like it’s not his own.

Sherlock sucks on the cigarette, then lets a puff of smoke out into the night.

“I don’t remember.”

John relaxes his arms. His left hand is itching. He lets his fingers curl into a fist, and relax.

He clears his throat. “You could be a little more subtle about this, you know.”

Sherlock looks at him. “Why? So you can try to ‘walk it out’? You’ll wear out your shoes trying, John. And this is much more fun.”

John thinks about the mud on his shoes last Sunday. He thinks about Sherlock not paying attention to him at all.

Sherlock takes the cigarette out of his mouth, shakes it off. He looks up at John, takes a breath. “If you—”

John backhands him.

There is a moment of silence. The world turns. London night hums through the open window. The cigarette has fallen from Sherlock’s fingers and into the Buckingham Palace ashtray.

Sherlock slowly turns his head from where it has snapped to the side, and looks up at John. His lower lip is split.

They look at each other for a little while. Sherlock’s eyes dart over John’s face, from his mouth to his eyes and then back to his mouth. A red mark is forming on his cheek, an unmistakable impression of knuckles.

John waits a moment, then raises his hand again, very slowly. Sherlock watches it out of the corner of his eye, but he doesn’t move. John aims very carefully and then hits him hard on the other cheek, because Sherlock likes symmetry, and John is here to provide. His open palm makes a loud crack against Sherlock’s face, and when Sherlock turns his head back again, his eyes are already losing focus.

Zero to Mind Palace in six seconds flat. _Jesus._ Had John known this last year—

He raises his hand one more time. Sherlock flinches, just barely, but he still doesn’t move away. John touches his jaw, slides his fingers over his ear and into his hair, and Sherlock closes his eyes, tips his head to the side and into John’s palm. John scrapes his fingers lightly against Sherlock’s scalp, tugs at his curls, and Sherlock exhales softly through his open mouth.

Their breath mingles. John swallows. Sherlock is a cacophony of clues, and John’s mind is alight with images in bright Technicolor, but he’s drawn the perimeter, and this is as far as it goes. He swallows again. His mouth is dry, so dry. God, this is madness.

He threads his fingers through Sherlock’s hair again, gentle where he pulled tight before. “What do you need?” he says. Sherlock doesn’t reply. John slides his hand, back and forth, back and forth, cups the shell of Sherlock’s ear in his palm. “Sherlock,” he says. “Tell me what you need,” and he thinks, _Quickly. For God’s sake. Please. Before I break._

Sherlock blinks his eyes open, focuses on John’s face. He looks confused, like he’s underwater, and can’t quite make sense of what’s being asked.

“This is, oh,” he says, and stops. A frown creases his forehead. John tugs at his hair again, lightly, to get his attention.

“Sherlock.”

Sherlock’s eyes focus again. “This is not about me, John.” Slow, like he’s sleepy.

John laughs. “Everything is about you, Sherlock. God, everything.” He cups the side of Sherlock’s face. “Now tell me what you need.”

Sherlock closes his eyes, frowns again like he’s in pain, although John’s hands are barely touching his skin. John’s thumb is running circles on Sherlock’s reddened cheek.

“This,” Sherlock says, after a while. “More of this.”

John nods. “My hands?”

“Yes,” Sherlock says. Something crosses his face, another frown, but different, like he just remembered. “And the belt,” he murmurs. “The belt was. Um. It was good.”

John nods again. He touches Sherlock’s cheek some more, thumb catching at the corner of Sherlock’s mouth, where the blood has dried. He thinks – can’t help, can’t stop – about his belt around Sherlock’s neck, the buckle branding his skin. Would Sherlock fight it, or would he submit, like he submits to everything else? Would he fall into John’s hurting hands without question?

John clenches his jaw. He blinks and blinks and blinks, and buries the image as deep as he can, as deep as he keeps the memories of the guns and the heat and the desert. The irony of it does not escape him, the dichotomy of his need. Is it unfair to want to do this to someone with full awareness that you won’t ever let them do that to you?

“All right,” he says when he is able to unglue his tongue from the roof of his mouth. “Come on.”

*

After, he helps Sherlock unclench his fingers from the footboard, helps him up from his knees and leads him over to the bed. Sherlock folds down, runs through John’s fingers like water. He rolls over onto his back, and throws one arm over his eyes. This is no good position to lie in – Sherlock got to fifty six and John had run out of space on his back long before that – but Sherlock is hard as a rock and he wraps his hand around himself even before John unlocks the bedroom door to go fetch the wet towels.

John leaves to give Sherlock some privacy. This part is not for him, even though Sherlock looks like he doesn’t care, but John understands how this works. The mixture of chemicals running through Sherlock’s veins makes him distant, unaware. His brain is seeking sensation. John is the provider of input, the catalyst for the avalanche. The avalanche is now falling, and he is not necessary anymore.

John grabs the towels, and stands in the bathroom for a little while. He tries to persuade himself that this is for the best. But no matter how hard he tries not to think, how hard he tries not to listen, the images in his head won’t let up.

No sense in fighting it. Sherlock doesn’t care either way. John takes the towels and goes back to the bedroom. He stands in the open doorway, leaning against the doorframe, breathes out, and stays as quiet as he can.

Sherlock’s body looks vulnerable, pale and stretched out like this, multi-angled and sharp-boned and somehow less substantial from far away than he’s been up close. His skin is layered with thin sweat all the way from his up-bent arm through his trembling stomach to his evocative feet. His right hand is moving, moving, quick, methodical, precise. His face is hidden, pressed into his biceps – an art studio model ready for a drawing, a perfect specimen of male anatomy arranged for dissection on a mortician’s slab.

John would like to think that this is trust – Sherlock exposed like this when the door is open and John is standing right there – but he remembers the careful lines of Sherlock’s body by the fireplace, the meticulously arranged outline of neck, face and knees; the cigarette at the open window, the creased trousers and the open collar – like a black-and-white movie of times past; a figure seared into global consciousness, a symbol etched so deep that John can’t hope to escape.

Sherlock puts his collar up high because it makes him look mysterious. He tailors his clothes and his shoes and his face with the precise knowledge of the effect it will have on people.

Sherlock curls his toes when he comes, and John will never again be able to look at Sherlock’s bare feet propped against the arm of the sofa without thinking of this.

John is utterly, hopelessly gone and he should have put the gun in his mouth when he had the chance.

When Sherlock is finished, John detaches himself from the doorframe and sits on the bed. He makes short work of Sherlock’s front and his hand, sliding the warm towel carefully over Sherlock’s skin, not letting himself linger. Sherlock lets his other arm fall to the side, and with his eyes closed he breathes deep and slow.

Sherlock’s face is red, streaked wet, and the echo of the inside and outside of John’s palm striking bone over and over again makes John’s fingers twitch. He wants to slide his hand into Sherlock’s hair again, he wants to pull, and hear the catch in Sherlock’s breath, the exhalation that is barely a sound, soft like music – but it’s over now, and he has to wait until Sherlock deems it convenient to call upon him again, to stage another provocation. Such is their life, after death.

He reaches out to touch Sherlock’s shoulder, get him to turn around so John can clean his back, but he stops before he makes contact. Sherlock’s eyes are closed. He is breathing shallowly through his nose now, and the muscles in his face and neck are smooth and relaxed. He has fallen asleep.

John should go. He should stand up, gather his useless towels, and leave. He should fold the blankets over Sherlock so he doesn’t get cold, and he should leave and close the door behind him. He should go clean his belt; he needs to wear it to work tomorrow.

He doesn’t leave. He lays his hand below Sherlock’s right knee, over the ridge of his tibia, and then slides it down, over the sparse hair until he reaches Sherlock’s ankle. He wraps his fingers around the foot, feels the bones under the skin. Sherlock’s toes twitch, and John glances at his face. It’s still blank and relaxed.

John drops the towels onto the floor. Sherlock’s left knee is bent upward – he opened his legs to give himself more room – and John reaches over for Sherlock’s left ankle, pulls down gently until Sherlock’s legs are lined up. Like a proper specimen, now. John rotates the left foot, back and forth, examines the range of movement. He observes the way the tendons shift under the skin and watches Sherlock’s face for any shade of discomfort. The bruising on the ankle is gone now, Sherlock is not wrapping it in a bandage anymore, but this is the first time John can properly examine the healing. It looks good. Sherlock sleeps.

This is cheating, John thinks, watching the steady pulse beating under the skin of Sherlock’s neck. He lets his hand travel up Sherlock’s left calf to his knee, over the outside of his leg to the top of his thigh. He would have to sit closer to continue touching, but he doesn’t dare move. This bed creaks, and it hasn’t been long since Sherlock has fallen asleep. John’s fingers span the protrusion of Sherlock’s hip, fingers gentle on the cooling skin. He watches Sherlock’s face.

It’s selfish to want this mouth. It’s illegal. But where is the harm if he looks his fill while Sherlock is unaware? Sherlock consented, brought him to this room, let John paint his skin red. Would it really hurt so much if John bent where he sits and touched his mouth to the bone of Sherlock’s hip, if he moved his lips to where Sherlock is now soft and spent, and kissed him there, just to see how he tastes, how he smells so soon after?

Yes, yes it would. John set the terms, mapped out the demarcation lines, and Sherlock consented because he can’t say no to a new source of sensation. Sherlock is experimenting, even now, on John, on himself, on their boundaries, if only to see whether they exist. This is not about John. This is not about sex. This is cheating.

John straightens up, stands. He folds half the blanket on top of Sherlock’s body, gathers up the towels and the belt, and leaves the room as quietly as he can.


	8. Line of Sight

Next week, John reduces his hours at the clinic. He brings home the crutches, in case Sherlock’s foot starts acting up, and he props them against the fireplace. He writes up the details of the Exploding Goldfish case on his blog. He does shopping, makes tea, and buys himself a new belt. Has an odd moment at the cash register when the clerk asks whether he found everything he was looking for. _That remains to be seen_ , thinks John, but he only smiles at the kid and hands his credit card over.

Sherlock turns into a Tasmanian Devil. They are bounced from a rather bloody double murder in Dartford, through a warehouse robbery in Chiswick, to a scene of the disappearance of an affluent widower who deals in exotic cats – all in less than 48 hours. John gets half an hour of shuteye in the cab, and another while waiting for Sherlock to finish sniffing every corner of a very impressive (and very spacious) Victorian house.

“The cheetah has never been in this residence,” Sherlock says, pacing back and forth. “You, sir, are a liar and a thief. Well, embezzler, to be precise. When did you say your father had been widowed?”

The son of the affluent cat dealer manages to hold his composure for exactly three minutes, whereupon he begins to break down rather spectacularly. John watches with interest, as does DI Dimmock, who is leaning against the door with his hands in his pockets. They don’t have to wait long. John and Dimmock exchange completely unsurprised glances when Sherlock brings up the deceased wife, who is, in fact, not so deceased after all, merely waiting for her son and her not-so-widowed-after-all husband to re-join her on some tropical island or other. The farce ends quickly after that: Dimmock arrests the man, Sherlock buttons the Belstaff, flags a cab, and holds the door open for John.

On their way back, Sherlock texts, his face illuminated by his smartphone screen, and John leans his forehead against the window and stares at the London night. He is exhausted, exhilarated, and peaceful. He smiles to himself. Sherlock keeps on texting.

*

The double murder turns out to be a double-suicide, and Sherlock loses interest even before Greg finishes speaking. He’s on his way out of the Yard, already checking his phone, and John smoothly shifts into the groove of being forgotten. It’s pleasant to be there again.

“Want to go out for a pint, John?” says Greg. “Jackson’s birthday. The oaf is twenty six. Twenty six! Can you imagine?”

John smiles. “No. I’ve never actually been that young.”

“Yeah, me neither.” Greg looks at him. “You coming with us? Anderson’s got the short straw, he’s driving. We can watch him drink orange juice all night.”

John considers. It’s after ten, he has clinic tomorrow. Some sleep right about now would be a godsend. But then he remembers Sherlock, all amped up and not sleepy at all, and a little time away from that suddenly sounds much better.

He shrugs. “Sure. Why not.”

*

They go to a pub one subway stop from Baker Street. They get a space at the end of the bar where they deposit a small cake. Everyone sings, Jackson blows out the candle, someone passes a knife, someone else a stack of paper plates. Greg orders the first round of shots. Anderson does look miffed for a while, but he gets into the spirit of things and is allowed one beer, so he cradles it through the night like it’s his baby. Sally keeps close to him – has ever since Anderson’s divorce; John never asked Greg if they’ve made any plans, and Greg has not volunteered information. There was weight behind those conversations for a long time – there isn’t any more, but none of them feel like talking about that anyway. It’s a birthday party, for God’s sake.

John gets pleasantly sloshed. A young constable named Martha hits on him quite openly since the very start of the evening, and that is… refreshing, John realises. Granted, it might be after his second or third beer, but flirting with a beautiful woman never gets old. John lets her pull him into a conversation, and carefully keeps all leather-bound thoughts away, tucked into a very, very small box. He succeeds. Alcohol, as he is keenly aware, is an antidote for many things, including too much thinking.

Oh, Sherlock would laugh himself stupid. _How is it in your funny little brains? Must be so relaxing._

John has zero doubts about the reason Martha is on his arm right now, and they are climbing carefully up the stairs, hitting every single stereotype of a drunken pair of strangers who met in a pub, got drunk together, and are about to have a shag. Martha is a very practical woman. Moved to London last year, got the job at the Met, has a sister in Wales who has been hounding her to live a little. So Martha is living a little: John is cute, he is clean, and he is a famous doctor who works with the police. He is _safe._

Yes, Sherlock would laugh himself stupid.

They negotiate the stairs, the landing, and then more stairs to John’s room. They spill in through the door, already kissing – Martha is tall, dark-skinned, and slender, and really fucking gorgeous – and John doesn’t turn on the light, just steers them blindly towards the bed. As they fall onto it with a creak of springs and their breaths huffing out sharp, John can’t help but wonder if Sherlock is listening.

The lights in the sitting room were off, John saw the dark windows from the street. Maybe Sherlock is out. Maybe not. What does that _matter_? They don’t have a relationship – they have an _arrangement_ , a mutually beneficial exchange of services, because John needed to let out his anger, just once, and Sherlock zeroed in on a new avenue to explore. That avenue does not include shagging, but John is human, practical and apparently safe. Also, he deserves to live a little as well.

“Hey,” says Martha. “Are you OK?”

John blinks down at her. He can see her dark face in the streetlight glow. “You are gorgeous,” he says.

She smiles, teeth gleaming. “You can’t even see me.”

“I have excellent night vision,” says John, and bends to kiss her throat. 

She throws her head back, moans long and low. “Or we could just switch on the lamp.”

In the end, they do it in the darkness. John could pretend this is of some significance, but he really doesn’t need to turn on the light, he can see her just fine. He also doesn’t like bright light when intoxicated. And he can’t be arsed to leave the warm space between her legs, once he’s settled himself there. He brings her off with his mouth, because she wanted to live a little, and John has admirable skills. After, she produces a strawberry-flavoured condom, and has her way with him while he fists his hands in the sheets and tries not to listen to the lack of sounds in the vents.

When he falls into her, at last, it’s with such bone-deep relief that he almost loses his erection. This is normal, he thinks as he angles his hips and thrusts into her slowly, so slowly. This is what normal looks like. And he’s longed to be normal; he’s waited sixteen months to be normal again.

When he comes, it’s like shattering a release valve of pent-up frustration. He didn’t realise how much he needed this. All these escapades, with Sherlock, the ritual demanding its due. There is no space for a shag between the belt and the hydrogen peroxide, not with Sherlock, but that is all right – John can fit the occasional date between the double murder and the theft of exotic cats, no problem. He can give his friend what he needs, fulfil his duty, and he can carve a piece for himself so that he doesn’t go completely bonkers.

Yes, John can make this work.

*

He wakes up the next day to the blare of his alarm clock and a mouth so dry he remembers his sophomore year at medical school. The bed is empty. He staggers to the bathroom, drinks cold water straight from the tap. An hour until he has to be in the clinic. He throws on his robe, checks the state of his stubble in the mirror—

A thud reverberates against the wall. A sound from somewhere below. Sitting room.

John stops, and listens.

Voices, arguing about something, laughing. The vents carry Sherlock’s melodious baritone and another voice, higher-pitched, but with a nice rasp to it.

John frowns. He remembers that rasp.

_Thud._

“Oh yeah!” and “Good!” come through the vents, and John blinks rapidly at himself in the mirror.

There is a world in which the image in his head makes sense. This is not that world. John gathers the flaps of his robe together and goes downstairs. He stops in the doorway to the sitting room and blinks.

And then he blinks some more.

Sherlock and Martha are standing in the middle of the room, very close to each other. Sherlock is wearing pyjamas. His dressing gown hangs loosely from his shoulders. His feet are bare, and John’s eyes go to them without his conscious involvement – he’s been conditioned, now, and this cannot be undone. Martha is wearing her clothes from yesterday, but she hasn’t put on her shoes either. Her long black hair is flowing over her shoulders, and Sherlock—

Sherlock is standing behind her, very close, aligning his body to hers, feet behind her feet spaced apart, shoulders behind her shoulders. Martha is tall; John noticed that yesterday; he likes taller people. Sherlock raises his hand and moves a lock of Martha’s hair to the side, so he can see down her arm, where his right hand aligns and guides her hand— 

In which she is holding a golf club. An honest-to-God real fucking golf club. There is a small white ball in the middle of the rug, placed on an inverted whiskey tumbler. Martha aims at it very carefully.

“Breathe out,” says Sherlock, into her ear. “And swing.”

Zip. Bang. _Thud._

Martha laughs in delight, and Sherlock smiles. The ball has hit the red circle on the wallpaper right in the middle, and dropped behind the sofa.

John stands in the doorway. There are more balls scattered around the sitting room, and a few different golf clubs stand propped up against the desk.

“Ah, John, you’re awake,” says Sherlock, brightly, as if he were reading the morning paper, and not playing golf (golf?) in the sitting room with the woman (the _police_ woman) John picked up at the pub (or did she pick him up? It’s hard to say, last evening is rapidly becoming too distant), and then shagged and fell asleep next to while she apparently decided to stay the night.

Sherlock is looking at him. So is Martha. They are both smiling. John feels like he’s entered the Twilight Zone.

“Breakfast?” says Sherlock.

*

Clinic is mind-numbingly boring. John examines the twelfth sore throat of the day, hands over another generic prescription, and finds himself drifting off. He looks for the empathy, for the feeling of peace he used to have while helping other human beings in need, but it’s not there anymore. Instead, he finds himself wishing for someone to break the pattern, to stumble through the door with an injury so gruesome and so painfully grotesque that his current boring patient would faint, and so would the majority of the clinic personnel, leaving only John to save the newcomer in the nick of time, like proper doctors do on TV.

He runs his hand over his face. Too many soap operas, not enough real life. He should have signed up to work in A&E.

He signs the prescription, hands it over. He calls up a smile to go with it, because the overtired, overworked mother of three (the sleeves of her shirt, the stains on her shoulder) deserves better than this.

“Thank you,” she says, and it’s genuine; it almost makes it all worth it.

The door closes. John drops the smile.

Three more hours. Oh _God_.

He made toast in the kitchen while Sherlock and Martha discussed angle and speed and trajectory, and then Martha pinned a few bloody photographs to the wall, Sherlock leaned in, and everything suddenly became clear in John’s mind.

Martha had brought Sherlock a _case_.

Last night rewound itself in his head. Martha had brought a bag with her yesterday. Said bag was now open on the coffee table, photographs and papers and case files sticking out. She’d had that bag in the pub, John vaguely recalled bumping against it while they were scrambling up the stairs.

He briefly wondered if she’d also brought the golf clubs, but then remembered Sherlock had his own set.

He sat in the kitchen, chewing through his toast, half-furious and half-amazed. The furious part raged at the fact that she used him, how could she just come up and use him like that, when he wasn’t what she really wanted, when all along she had something else in mind, and he was just a distraction…

And then the half-amazed part pointed out – in Sherlock’s voice, nonetheless – that he got off pretty spectacularly last night, and she didn’t seem too unhappy, either, and now she was in their flat, engaged in a conversation with a completely engrossed consulting detective, who was listening and replying to her questions as if he had forgotten about other people being boring and dull and intellectually inferior.

So John finished his toast, drank his coffee, got dressed and left them like this, dark heads bowed together over papers and photographs, and he went to work.

Which is boring and dull and intellectually not challenging at all.

His phone chirps.

_Muscle-back iron no 5. Astonishing what bored people get up to. Lunch? –SH_

John stares at the message for a little while. Lack of sleep still fogs out the edges of his vision, makes it hard to translate words into meaning. At last, he types a slow reply.

_Murder weapon? You would know. It’s 3 PM._

The response comes right away, because Sherlock can have three conversations at once like it’s nobody’s business.

_Yes, isn’t it delightful? I’m told I have my moments. Early dinner, then. – SH_

_Gruesome. Weeks, more like it. I have patients._

_Precisely. Not today. Pick up Thai on your way home. - SH_

*

John picks up Thai on his way home, from their newly discovered – and now regularly used – restaurant two streets away. He held out for one more hour, and managed to offload the rest of his patients to a new doctor – he has the feeling that they will have to rely on Sherlock’s income from now on; there are only so many times he can miss work, even on a shortened schedule. 

He elbows his way into 221B, holding the takeout bags in his teeth. Before he manages to fully close the door, Mrs Hudson intercepts him with a pleading expression.

“John, would you do something, please. He’s been at this for hours. Mrs Turner is threatening to call the police. Her tenants went out, but they’re coming back soon, and if this continues…”

John is already running up the steps.

Upstairs, Sherlock is still playing golf. Martha is gone, but the crime scene photos on the wall are still there, and they are in tatters. Sherlock has changed into a white shirt and black suit trousers, so he must have gone out sometime during the day, but he is wearing his dressing gown again, he lacks shoes and socks, and his hair is wild, as if he got caught in the rain. He picks up a ball from the bucket at his feet, lays it down very carefully on the whiskey glass, and aims the club.

Zip. Bang. _Thud._

John doesn’t say anything. He toes off his shoes, hangs up his jacket. He goes over to the kitchen, sets the takeout containers on the table, contemplates setting water down for tea. No, he decides, he isn’t thirsty yet. Maybe later. He pours himself a tumbler of scotch instead.

Zip. Bang. _Thud._

He walks over and stands in the doorway to the sitting room. He takes a slow sip from his glass, and watches Sherlock. Mrs Hudson has waited for hours; several more minutes of this can’t possibly hurt.

Zip. Bang. _Thud._

The choreography of Sherlock’s body is flawless. His neck, his wrists, and once again, the dance of his bare feet, all designed to work together, like flare points that draw the eyes to them in an instant. His collar is open, but his shirt is perfectly tucked into his trousers, giving in just the right amount when he straightens and twists. John watches the graceful swing of his arm, the billow of the silk of his dressing gown.

Zip. Bang. _Thud._

Sherlock doesn’t look at him. He sends another ball on its ill-fated flight, and then another. When he bends to pick them up and set them on the tumbler, John watches the angle between Sherlock’s thigh and his torso, imagines the bruised skin stretching over bones, right there. He lets himself drift into imagining what Sherlock will need from him, this time. It’s intriguing.

Sherlock hits one more ball and throws the club onto the sofa. Then he straightens, reaches into the pocket of his dressing gown, the pocket that’s been hidden from John’s view, and he pulls out an object. 

John blinks.

The object is John’s Sig Sauer P226R, last seen in a locked strongbox underneath John’s bed in his bedroom upstairs.

John blinks again, and is surprised for all of three seconds, but then he remembers that this is also what they do, so he should have seen this coming, and honestly, the only thing that should be surprising here is how long Sherlock managed to hold out before borrowing John’s gun.

Sherlock looks closely at the Sig, as if admiring the engineering, and then he turns it towards himself and looks down the barrel.

John’s vision narrows down. He can’t catch his breath. He has the vague feeling that he’s holding a glass, but it might have fallen from his fingers; he isn’t sure. In his mind’s eye, he sees Sherlock breaking into his bedroom and finding the box. He sees Sherlock breaking into the box, rummaging for rounds. Loading the magazine.

The sense-memory of the clip sliding in scorches through John’s mind like lightning, and lodges like a blunt needle low in his gut.

Sherlock with a gun, John realises, fascinated. Sherlock with a gun is _arousing._

He tries to think, tries to focus. Sherlock knows how to shoot. He knows how to aim. Did he kill anyone during the time he was away? His story, from Budapest to India to Brazil, was full of epic adventure, but it lacked certain detail. John let it go – he’s been to war, he can fill in the detail himself – but now he wants to _know_. He absolutely _needs_ to find out.

Sherlock stares down the barrel for a little while, and then he flips the gun back, aims it at the wall, squints. Slowly, he clicks off the safety. He is aiming at the red circle. He is not looking at John.

“You wanted to kill yourself when I was gone,” he says, conversationally. “Why?”

John swallows. He has to take a breath to do that, so he does. He discovers the scotch glass is still sitting firmly in his hand. He sets it on a shelf by the kitchen door, flexes his empty fingers. He clears his throat. 

“Even you can’t be that dense.”

Sherlock tilts his head, like he’s considering the answer. “Hmm, no.” He chews his lip. His voice is quiet, thoughtful, and deceptively steady. “Not good enough, John.” 

Slowly, Sherlock rotates his arm, still extended, and aims the Sig at John’s forehead.

“I’m afraid you’ll have to do better than this,” he says, and his voice is still very steady, too steady, and John frowns, and looks closer, and when he finally sees, all the blood freezes in his veins, because Sherlock’s voice is steady, his hand even more so, but his eyes are shining.


	9. Demarcation Problem

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Warnings. Remember there were warnings in the first chapter. All right? All right. Let's roll.

John breathes slowly, in and out, and remains still.

This is just a gun. Not a vest of explosives. Not a rooftop of a hospital. Not a pavement. John can handle this.

Sherlock watches him from behind the barrel. His eyes are glassy, overbright, and the expression on his face is like pain, like desperation. It makes no sense. Just this morning, Sherlock looked like the world was his oyster. Just this morning, Sherlock looked like their life was back to _normal_. Something must have happened, John thinks. Something must have triggered this behaviour. Sherlock often acts like a madman, but he is never _irrational_ , there is always a _method._

God, how much did he take? Is the peak over, or are they still headed for the overdrive? How solid is Sherlock’s grip on reality? How fast are his reactions? Would he fire if John made a move, or would he be too slow to notice? Damn it, _how much did he take?_

John scans the room, but nothing is immediately visible among the usual mess of papers and books. Which only means Sherlock wanted John to notice this on _him_ , wanted John to wonder, to worry. Wanted John to be angry again.

“Interesting,” Sherlock says, tilting his head. “You didn’t know.”

John wets his lips. “Didn’t know what?”

Sherlock points the gun at the ceiling and pulls the trigger. 

The empty snap of the hammer goes straight to John’s bones – although his body must have known what would happen; deep down inside, he must have known. Sherlock wouldn’t point a loaded gun at him, because Sherlock is not an idiot.

Scratch that, Sherlock is most definitely an idiot.

“Mycroft confiscated the bullets,” says Sherlock. He lowers the Sig and looks into the barrel once more, as if he can find the missing round there. “Something about not tempting fate. How absurd.”

John thinks about the strongbox under his bed. He thinks how he didn’t pack it himself, how it appeared in the boxes the movers brought over. How he put it in the bedroom upstairs without looking inside.

“When?” he says. His throat is very dry. 

“When you moved to Kensington,” says Sherlock. “When he went into your flat and saw your list.”

John swallows. There is a hollow, painful feeling in the back of his throat. Rising to the bait, so predictable. But he can’t help it. 

“Morons,” Sherlock says. “Morons, all of them, even Mycroft. As if you would—You’d never kill yourself, John.”

John raises his chin and holds himself still. “And what makes you think that?” His voice is very calm.

Sherlock looks up at him – looks _through_ him, like John is a crime scene and everything is written right there, in the forensic evidence of his body – and then he smiles, wide and manic and real, and raises the gun to John’s eye level again. There’s a tremor in his hand now, badly contained. Emotions? Drugs? Hard to tell.

“Because you are not allowed,” snarls Sherlock. “Do you understand? You are not _allowed_.”

Something goes off quietly in John’s gut, something violent and bright-edged and sharp, like an exploding bag full of nails. 

The twinge in his arm pulls at the muscle, makes him roll his left hand into a fist. He shifts, redistributes his weight for better balance. This is the foothold that he will defend.

He wets his lips. “You do realise,” he says slowly, “that you’re pointing an empty gun at me, yeah?”

Sherlock blinks. His smile falters. He looks at the gun, scowls at it. Then he flicks it away and onto the sofa. He stands empty-handed for a moment, and then he spins round and picks up a club from the cluster by the desk. He steps towards John, brandishing the club like a weapon, and John tenses against his better judgment.

Sherlock comes closer, slowly, and when he is a few feet away, he flips the club over in the air, catches it and holds it out, handle first, to John. 

John takes the club. He weighs it in his hand. It’s quite heavy. The head is small and oval. John doesn’t know the type; he’s never been a golf kind of guy. 

Sherlock steps back, and stands in the middle of the room, empty hands at his sides. But he doesn’t stand still. His fingers are flexing, his toes dig into the rug. There is twitchiness in Sherlock’s body, matching the brightness in his eyes. He can’t contain his excitement, John realises. Sherlock on drugs is even more transparent than Sherlock without. 

“What do you want me to do with this?” says John.

Sherlock nods. “What you always do, John,” he says. “Hit me.”

John shuts his eyes for a moment, then breathes out very slowly, and looks up. The nails in his gut are growing warmer, heating him from the inside out. “I could kill you.”

“Yes.” Sherlock’s eyes gleam. “Isn’t that _exciting?_ ”

*

And this, John will think later, this was the last moment when he could have turned this round. He could have laid down the club, made Sherlock tea, and let him ride out the rest of his high in a strop, but without getting his fix. Some china might have been broken, maybe even some furniture; Mrs Hudson would have to add a small sum to their rent the following month. Nothing major.

But the problem – his major problem – is that John lives on adrenaline spikes. Sherlock is well aware of that fact, having been the sole provider of John’s entertainment for two years and change. And even drugged to the gills Sherlock can still lead an expert offensive: not too much, not too little, just the right amount in all the right places. No one can stand a chance, and John even less so, because John is already weak. Sherlock might not know the full extent of his weakness, but it doesn’t make it any less true.

All things considered, they truly are a match made in heaven.

*

John shudders. A small adrenaline spike, really, not very much at all. It’s the way he reacts to mild stress – not enough to send him fleeing, not enough to make him coil into a bolt of reaction. He tightens his hand on the golf club handle. There is sweat springing up on the insides of his palms. The nails in his gut have begun to dissolve, seeping fire into his bloodstream.

_Isn’t that exciting?_

“No,” John lies. “It really isn’t.”

Sherlock smiles, baring incisors. He glances round, bounces on the balls of his feet. “Where do you want me?” He sounds downright gleeful.

John clenches his jaw. Sherlock doesn’t understand this is serious. He is high, but not high enough; probably measured the dose just so, just shy of rendering himself useless, just within the brackets of safe, sane, and consensual, so John’s morals would not override John’s desire. He is standing in his anxious pose in the middle of the sitting room, overamped energy bursting from him in waves, and John has had enough of this.

He points the club towards Sherlock’s feet.

“Get on your knees.”

Sherlock glances behind him, at the wide open curtains. Then he kneels slowly on the rug and cocks an eyebrow at John.

“Giving them a show today? Alas, better late than never.” He grins. “Oh. Ohhh. You think this will stop me. John, really, have you learned nothing at all?”

John comes up to him. He lifts the club to Sherlock’s face and Sherlock narrows his eyes for a moment, but John’s aim is perfect: he touches the tip of the club to the bow of Sherlock’s upper lip. The metal clinks against Sherlock’s teeth.

“Shhh,” John says. “Don’t talk anymore.”

Sherlock smiles against the metal, but he doesn’t speak.

“Good,” says John. “Good.” He moves the club down Sherlock’s chin to his throat, and then further down, over his Adam’s apple to the hollow between his collarbones. Sherlock’s eyelids droop. His mouth is open, enough to draw a shallow breath. His smile begins to fade. Ten seconds, and he’s already at the steps of the Mind Palace, reaching for the door. John needs to hurry this up.

“Your safeword is ‘stop’,” says John. “If you throw in a ‘please’, I might stop sooner.” He runs the tip of the club down Sherlock’s chest, over the bumps of shirt buttons. He stops at Sherlock’s waist. “If you can’t talk, reach out and tap me, twice. Repeat if I’m busy. Repeat until I stop. Nod if you understand.”

Sherlock nods. He has closed his eyes. John moves the club lower, over to the front of Sherlock’s trousers. He takes a breath, and then he dares, and runs the club slowly down the ridge of Sherlock’s erection.

Sherlock makes a low sound and wrenches his head to the side.

John draws the club back up, then down again, puts pressure on it.

Sherlock exhales. “I’m sorry,” he grits out. “This is—”

“Shh.” John taps him with the club, not too hard, just enough to make Sherlock’s brows draw together. “Yes,” he says. “You will be sorry. But not for this. Take off your shirt.”

Sherlock reaches to his half-open collar. His eyes are still squeezed shut and he is taking short breaths through his mouth. His hands are shaking.

“Good,” says John, watching Sherlock’s fingers work the buttons, down, down, down, tremor, tremor, slip. “Now pull out my belt.”

Sherlock discards the shirt, forcing his hands through the cuffs, and he reaches to clink John’s belt buckle open. Eyes closed, perfect spatial awareness, and it’s interesting, thinks John, because Sherlock doesn’t seem to have understood what John said about the safeword. _If you can’t talk, reach out._ Is he consenting, or just not processing?

“Make a loop,” says John. He threads his fingers through Sherlock’s hair, tugs a little. Sherlock pulls the belt out of John’s trousers. It’s the new belt; John wore it to work today. Sherlock’s fingers pause on the leather, examining it, like he’s trying to identify the brand by texture. John allows him this moment, because he is not in a hurry, and this is Sherlock, presented with yet another previously uncatalogued sensation. Finally, Sherlock snaps out of it, threads the end of the belt through the buckle, and makes a loop large enough for John’s hand.

“No,” says John. “Make it wider.”

And at that, Sherlock stills.

John waits, fingers lightly scraping Sherlock’s scalp. He touches the tip of the golf club to the floor, next to Sherlock’s right knee; not pressing, just resting. He hasn’t yet decided what he wants to do with the club. He doesn’t really have a plan B for when all this goes horribly, terribly wrong. He only knows that the moment Sherlock safewords out, John is going to leave the flat and take a very, very long walk. Perhaps all the way up to Harry’s.

After what feels like a full minute, punctuated by the steady beat of John’s heart in his ears, Sherlock moves his hands. He threads the leather back through the metal, fingers moving slowly, like he has to think very carefully to calculate the exact radius of the loop.

John swallows. “Good,” he says, and then, “Now put it over your head,” which is unnecessary, because Sherlock is already raising his hands, dislodging John’s fingers. He slides the belt over his head, and fits it around his neck, pulling until the loop wraps around his throat. Then he opens his eyes, and looks up, and offers the end of the belt to John.

All the air goes out of John’s lungs. Sherlock’s eyes are unreadable, and infinitely calm. They’ve lost their shimmer of substance abuse, and John wonders, wrenchingly so, if Sherlock had faked that too.

He takes the end of the belt. Sherlock’s hands fall away and settle, with care, on the outsides of John’s knees. Sherlock doesn’t say anything, just watches John’s face with that unbreachable calm, and John remembers he forbade him to talk.

He swallows again, forces his dry mouth to shape words. He wants this. Sherlock wants this. If Sherlock doesn’t consent, he can always bow out. John gave him a safeword. This is fine.

“Go on,” says John, because he can say nothing else, and because nothing else needs saying. He tightens his hand on the belt, and gives a small pull, forward and down. Setting the boundaries, nothing more. Sherlock leans with it, smooth and silent, and sits on his heels. 

He runs his hands up, over the outsides of John’s thighs, and moves to open John’s zip. His fingers are careful, slow, and John grits his teeth when Sherlock’s fingertips touch skin. John is barely half-hard, but he can’t be faulted for this – this whole situation is so far out of his comfort zone he can’t even see the stop signs anymore. And he’s barely begun to settle into a new groove with Sherlock, one that didn’t involve this, so it can’t be a surprise that his body is shorting out on mixed signals, that his mind is rebelling against them, that his bloody morals would choose this moment to pipe up and throw a wrench into the—

Sherlock leans in and takes him into his mouth.

“Oh God,” says John, and clamps his hand over his teeth. Distantly, he can hear the golf club clatter onto the floor. He bites the inside of his palm; a spike of pain, absolutely necessary, because yes, good _God, oh Jesus Christ._

Sherlock leans in, all the way in, and then pulls off, rests, and slides back up again. He keeps his mouth tight, tongue flattened out. His breath is warm in John’s pubic hair, and cold where Sherlock has made him wet, and it’s good, it’s so good John could forget where he is, forget the reason they’re doing this, and forget that he’s holding a belt. If he can keep himself still just for a minute, if he can keep his eyes closed, and give himself over to the luxury of that pressure, that breath, if he can scrub the circumstance of this encounter from the surface of his mind, and put in its place something entirely different—

He is cold.

He opens his eyes. The first thing he sees is the belt, gone slack in his grip. The second are Sherlock’s eyes, watchful and calm. Sherlock has pulled off, leaned back and is now studying John’s face. A frown begins to crease his brow, and John can’t let this happen. 

He pulls the belt taut, grasps the side of Sherlock’s face and pushes his thumb between Sherlock’s lips. Sherlock makes a short, startled sound, but opens for him, and John lines up, and guides himself back inside. He holds the end of the belt, immobilizes Sherlock between the leather and his hand, and then he slowly rolls his hips round and _forward._

Sherlock makes a guttural noise and chokes. He jerks his hands towards John’s hips, but he doesn’t touch. He holds his arms up, away from John’s body, palms open, fingers curled, indecisive. John pulls back a little, and thrusts again, and Sherlock heaves up dry from his throat and clenches his hands into fists. But still he doesn’t touch, doesn’t tap. Maybe he doesn’t remember.

John leans back, looks down at Sherlock’s face. Sherlock’s eyes are squeezed shut. There’s a tear sliding down his left cheekbone. John fights the urge to trace it with his finger.

“One more time,” he says quietly. “Then I let you rest.”

Sherlock’s fists loosen. He doesn’t open his eyes. John keeps his hold on the belt, shifts his left hand over to Sherlock’s nape to secure him, and begins pushing slowly back in.

For a while, Sherlock remains pliant. He breathes through his nose, nostrils flaring, but then John hits the back of his throat and keeps going, and Sherlock arches his spine and almost comes off of his knees. John digs his fingers into the back of his neck and doesn’t stop. If Sherlock really wanted this over, he’d have no problem shoving John back and landing him hard on the floor. So John keeps up the pressure, glances at the loop around Sherlock’s neck to see how it’s holding– 

The belt has tightened, and the tendons in Sherlock’s neck stand rigid. The flush creeping up onto his face is just a shade too deep.

John lets go of the belt and pulls out, one smooth motion. He tips Sherlock’s face up and quickly works the buckle loose, fingers squeezing between metal and skin. Sherlock wheezes in a breath, and then he chokes and coughs, and looks round, eyes wild and wide and _gone_ , and John feels a pang in his chest, hard and hot, because this is insane, Sherlock wanting this is insane, and if giving this is what it means to love someone, then John wants to cut out this feeling and shove it in a box somewhere, and lock it up, safe and hidden, and far away from his black little heart.

“You’re all right,” he says, feeling out Sherlock’s pulse, watching his dilated pupils as Sherlock’s eyes dart back and forth, not focusing on anything. He listens to Sherlock’s breath, sharp and uneven. The belt is still around Sherlock’s neck, and John is still hard.

“You’re fine,” John says, running his hand over Sherlock’s face, over the side of his neck. “Just breathe.” 

Sherlock breathes. He closes his eyes, and sways forward, leans his forehead against John’s hip. They stay like that for a while.

Eventually, Sherlock’s breathing goes back to normal. His hands flex, his back curves down, and the pressure against John’s hip lets up – Sherlock is coming back round; he is going to lift his head, move away – so John takes a breath, leans over, and grasps the end of the belt again. He pulls at the leather, gently, no need to rush; Sherlock should know what to avoid by now.

When Sherlock lifts his head, John fits his palm against Sherlock’s cheek again, fingers hooked underneath his jaw. He keeps the belt taut, finds the proper balance of pressure and hold, pries Sherlock’s mouth open and slides slowly back in.

It takes a long time, even though it’s a fairly simple procedure, and one which John is more than adequately fit to control. In the end, it’s only mechanics. Repetition and friction. The small sounds, the shallow breaths. Sherlock’s naked shoulders. Eventually, Sherlock learns to suppress his gag reflex, and he doesn’t seize up every time John hits too deep. The muscles in his back relax and his body falls into position, his hands touch the outsides of John’s knees again, and don’t move. John settles into the slow rhythm, and when he feels the first tendrils of the oncoming spasm, he shuts his eyes, slides his hand from Sherlock’s jaw into his hair, and tightens his fist.

Sherlock doesn’t fight it. John isn’t sure if he expected him to. It’s getting hard to think. The pressure builds and crests, and he comes, sharp and hot and disarming, and as he shudders through it, he feels Sherlock’s hands grip him tight, squeeze to the point of pain, and hold on.

*

After, he washes up in the bathroom, and looks at his face in the mirror. He looks tired, and older than he’s ever felt. The light in Sherlock’s bathroom is not flattering.

He made sure Sherlock was steady, kneeling on the sitting room rug, before he moved away to fetch a wet flannel. He wiped Sherlock’s mouth and chin and unwound the belt from his neck. Sherlock’s eyes didn’t focus on him throughout, and his hands remained still, curled into loose fists at his sides. John dropped the flannel into the sink and didn’t stay to watch him. He ran the water in the bathroom to stop himself listening.

He doesn’t know what the fuck he’s just done. He knows he’s shifted the line, but he hasn’t changed the dynamics; Sherlock is no closer to lover than he was when John was striping his back blood red. In fact, he might be closer to subject than he was ever before: perfectly obedient, perhaps mildly surprised, but not even one tiny bit less curious.

How much will it take, thinks John, before Sherlock says stop? How much further before he realises scientific inquiry has no place in an arrangement like this? How much more before he runs out of predictable reactions, and has to rely on instinct, and discovers that _it doesn’t always work?_

Sherlock got hit by love, once. It was like an oncoming train, and it knocked him off the rails and sent him spinning into despair and impaired brain function. Oh, how he must have despised it. This, by Sherlock’s reckoning, must be much more predictable: here is a sandbox to play in, leave your shoes at the door, don’t forget your riding crop, thank you, please come again.

Except John loves him. The thought fills him with dread. Loving Sherlock. Not the way he did _before_ , overwhelming and happy and bright, in breathless chases through London and sleepless nights when the only thing that mattered was being there when Sherlock figured out the puzzle. No, John loves him like you love a hurricane, with all the proper respect it deserves, and with full awareness that it will come and it will rip you to shreds. It’s not sane, it’s not safe, it’s not even consensual.

Sherlock would be appalled.

When John comes out of the bathroom, Sherlock is standing in the kitchen, his back turned. He is buttoning up the cuffs of a clean black shirt. He’s also changed into new trousers and put on socks. John stops in the hallway, confused – it’s six PM; if Sherlock doesn’t wear pyjamas all day, he should be changing into them right about now, and not the other way around.

Only when Sherlock winds his scarf around his neck and reaches for his coat does John register that Sherlock has dressed like he’s going out because he is going out.

Sherlock’s phone is out on the table. John comes up, hits the wake button. Text from Lestrade, with an address. He looks at Sherlock.

“What’s going on?”

Sherlock glances at him over his coat collar. His face betrays nothing. “Murder. Doors locked from the inside. Apparently there is quite a collection of knives and some paraphernalia from the Far East. Should be interesting.”

He buttons his coat, pulls on his gloves with steady hands.

“Well,” says John. He looks round the kitchen. “Have fun, then.”

Sherlock finishes putting on his gloves, and turns fully to John. 

“Don’t be,” he says slowly, and clears his throat. “Don’t be an idiot, John.”

They look at each other. John has clinic again tomorrow. He is painfully aware of that fact. Locked-room murders can run anywhere from five minutes to several days, and judging by the speed with which Sherlock got dressed, this one doesn’t look likely to take less than a day.

“All right,” says John. “All right.”


	10. Collateral Damage

The locked-room mystery takes Sherlock less than ten minutes.

There is a dead man in the middle of the room (posh little City flat, fifteenth floor), surrounded by a wide pool of blood. He is sitting on his heels, body curled forward, arms tucked in underneath his chest, forehead touching the floor. John can’t tell how tall he was, but he can tell whatever killed him didn’t just cut skin and veins.

Sherlock barely wrinkles his nose at the smell, and then he’s walking around the man in a slow circle, bending to look closer. The Yarders have already wrapped up, and it’s only Greg now. He stands back, watching Sherlock from the doorway. John stands next to him.

“Girlfriend found him,” says Greg. “Swears up and down the door was closed. There’s nothing on the security tapes, and her alibi checks out. She was down at the pub with some friends, we have her on CCTV. I’m inclined to treat this as suicide, but you know how it goes...”

He trails off, and John looks at him, frowning.

“I can find my own entertainment, Inspector, thank you,” says Sherlock from the floor. He is sitting on his haunches, staring intently at the body. “But your intuition, if misguided, was correct. This is not suicide.”

“Where’s the murder weapon?” says John.

Greg makes a face, and Sherlock smiles, sudden and predatory.

“John,” he says, and John comes closer. They crouch next to each other, just outside of the darkening pool, and from this position John can see that the answer to his question is still firmly lodged in the victim. A decorated hilt of what must be a very long knife protrudes from between the clenched fists.

“What are you thinking?” says Sherlock, quietly. John looks at him. They are very close. Sherlock’s eyes are clear, sparkling. The smile twitches at the edges of his mouth. John looks down.

Sherlock’s lower lip is split. 

John blinks, tears his eyes away. He looks at the dead man on the floor, tries to comprehend what he sees beyond a dead body with a knife in the gut. There are no visible signs of struggle – only a man with an iron will could do this without struggle.

People have been known to do a great many odd things. And this has precedent.

He sighs. “This isn’t murder.”

Sherlock hums. “Oh, but it is. Look.”

John looks.

“ _Seiza_ ,” says Sherlock. “Classic position in which to commit _seppuku_. Feet folded flat, knees slightly apart, sitting on one’s heels. The cut is horizontal, from left to right. He fell forward, and stayed that way, which is commendable; one should only hope to die in such a perfect position. Except it’s just too perfect.”

John looks closer. The symmetry of the limbs is indeed striking.

“I don’t know,” he says. “Could be gravity.”

Sherlock pauses, looks at him. “Yes,” he says, his brows drawing tight, like what John said was an actual contribution to his thinking process. “Under different circumstances I would agree. But look at this flat.”

John looks around the living room. There are decorated fans and masks on the door, a vaguely Eastern tapestry, and a few vases that look like they’ve found their way out of a modern art museum. There are no flowers in them, so they must serve a more sophisticated purpose.

“There is some Japanese décor, I admit,” says Sherlock, “but all of it are cheap knockoffs, and by the way, that mask over there is a Balinese topeng. There is nothing about this death that constitutes a proper ritual of seppuku: not the clothing, not the knife. There is no food or drink. Needless to say, his head is still attached, so no second. Suicidal romantic? Likes drama? Could be. It’s definitely creative. So creative, in fact, that the coroner might just overlook the toxicology results, or mistake them for self-administered for courage.”

John sniffs the air, but can smell nothing but acid. “He was arranged, then?”

“Obviously.”

“But by whom?”

Sherlock looks up at Greg. “Did the girlfriend stay here after she called you?”

Greg comes closer. “She was at the door.”

“And she didn’t see anyone? Didn’t close a mysteriously open window?”

“No. She touched nothing. Do you think she was in on it?”

“Hmm. What? No.” Sherlock stands. He looks round. John stands up as well, moves out of the way.

Sherlock crosses the living room, steps into the adjacent kitchen. Comes back out, moves on to the bedroom. John can hear him walking slowly, footsteps on the hardwood floor.

John looks at Greg. Greg shrugs. _We looked everywhere._

The footsteps stop. There’s a soft click, and the light in the bedroom goes off.

A few things happen at the same time.

There’s another click, and then a scraping sound, like a heavy object being pushed across the floor. John moves towards the bedroom, and Greg moves to follow. In the dark, there are sudden footsteps, a crash, a muffled shout, and the sound of something soft hitting the wall and then sliding down.

John flips the light back on.

Sherlock is standing in the middle of the bedroom, his back turned to the door. He is panting, and his hair is in disarray. He is holding a broken lamp. And at his feet, slung unconscious against the night table, is a man dressed completely in black.

“There,” Sherlock says, turning round. “He never left the flat. Oldest trick in the book. Boring. Find me something better next time, would you?”

“Sherlock, what is that?” says Greg.

“Surely even you can’t be that stupid,” scowls Sherlock, throwing the remains of the lamp onto the bed. “It’s the murderer. And that, over there, is a very small panic room. Quite convenient, I have to say. Perhaps we should get one in the flat, John. We could hide from Mrs Hudson when—”

“Sherlock,” says Greg.

John looks at Greg, and finally comprehends what Greg is looking at.

“Experiment,” says Sherlock, not missing a beat, and quickly winds his loosened scarf back around his neck. Then he sidesteps Greg, crosses the living room and walks out of the flat.

Greg looks at John, and John feels a hot flush coming up to his face.

Greg watches him very closely. Then he looks after Sherlock. There is an unconscious murderer on the floor barely a few feet away, but Greg pays him no mind.

“John,” he says. “What’s going on?”

John swallows. He can’t look back at Greg. He looks at the door, where Sherlock went.

“Experiment,” he says. “Suffocation. It’s for a case.”

“Case,” says Greg. “Jesus.” He rubs at his face with both hands, steps away. “Jesus,” he says again. He looks round the room, as if the answers can be found in the walls. “Jesus bloody Christ, John. Were you… Were you even _around?_ ”

John blinks. It takes him an embarrassingly long time to comprehend what Greg is asking.

“Oh. No, no,” he says, quickly. “It wasn’t... He’s not trying… Of course I was around.” Talking feels like crunching through gravel. “It’s all right, Greg. It was safe.”

Greg stares at him. Then blinks, as if he’s just remembered the murderer on the floor. He looks down, obviously gauging if he should call for backup or if he can haul the man out by himself.

“All right,” he says. “All right. Just… Jesus, John. Don’t let him do that to us again, will you? The bastard doesn’t know what that felt like.”

John nods. There is a stone lodged in his throat. It’s hard to breathe around it.

“I won’t let him,” he says. “It’s… I won’t let him.”

When he gets out of the elevator fifteen floors down, he expects Sherlock to already be gone.

Sherlock isn’t. He stands at the empty curb, hands in pockets, with his back to John.

“Dinner?” he says when John comes up. “There’s a small Japanese place a few streets west of here. This case has got me in a sudden mood for _wagashi_.”

*

John has had his share of international cuisine. You can’t live any other way, not if you live in London. He does have a fondness for fish and chips – even though hardly a waistline to prove it – and in his drinking habits he remains quintessentially British – but it’s the greasy paper, plastic chopsticks and Styrofoam bowls in all shapes and sizes that give him that warm feeling of being _home._

Tonight, though, he isn’t hungry. They left perfectly good Thai at home, gone cold by now on the kitchen table. John will put it away, and heat it up for himself later; he is severely uncomfortable with wasting food, while Sherlock usually wrinkles his nose and says there’s no point, and _It’s meant to be eaten fresh, John_ , even though Sherlock never meant to eat it anyway, as the food was merely a ploy to bring John home early.

This, too, could be a ploy, John thinks, watching Sherlock devour his bean cakes and sip his green tea, and glance at his phone, making occasional searches and frowning at the results. For all intents and purposes he appears to be lost in thought, and he hasn’t said a word beyond reciting the order to the waiter – but John knows better.

Sherlock has taken great care to keep his scarf on and keep it carefully wound about this neck, even though the restaurant is warm, and he did take off his gloves and unbutton his coat. John didn’t comment on it, because he can’t quite bring himself to say _ligature mark_ , even though his fingers itch to touch it, to examine, to help him estimate how long Sherlock is going to be wearing this particular stripe.

He could tell himself he didn’t mean to. That he didn’t know it would happen. But the truth of it is that this is what happens, and that there’s more where this came from, and John meant everything. There is a box of sharp implements in this particular corner of his mind, and he’s letting Sherlock peer into that box, and understand what he will find there. Sherlock obviously has a hypothesis, he is testing a theory, and who is John to interfere with an experiment by invalidating results? This is data. Sherlock likes data.

Sherlock is saying something.

“Hm?” John looks up from his untouched sashimi. No sense in preserving that one. Sherlock ordered for him. Perhaps that, too, was deliberate.

“I asked if you were all right,” says Sherlock. He has turned off his phone and is holding the last bean cake between his chopsticks, watching John with his transparent eyes.

“I’m fine,” says John. He gives a small smile. “Bit of gore tonight. Not really in the mood for raw fish.”

Sherlock watches him, and bites slowly into his cake. John looks away.

Sherlock doesn’t ask anything else. Out of the corner of his eye John can see him finish off the cake and the tea. Then Sherlock flings cash on the table and stands up. John doesn’t meet his eyes and follows him out of the restaurant.

*

On the way back to Baker Street, Sherlock unwinds his scarf. He touches the red stripe of skin, examines it in his reflection in the cab window. John holds out for less than three seconds, and then he turns round to look. 

Sherlock is running his fingers lightly down his neck, back and forth.

“I’m not ashamed of it, John,” he says, not looking at John, and John watches his throat move.

Sherlock’s elegant fingers tap against his skin with no rhythm, and John wonders, for the first time, how it would feel for Sherlock to touch him, to really touch him, under no obligation or duress, and in response to John giving him pleasure instead of watching his pain.

John swallows. “Does it hurt?”

Sherlock’s hands fall away. He looks out into the street. He seems to ponder the question for a little while, as if analysing his own sensations has become difficult.

“Yes,” he says, at last. “Yes, it does.”

*

John practises his avoidance techniques for the next three days. He is getting rather good at that, when Sherlock is not interfering.

There are no cases, so Sherlock has disappeared into Bart’s to harass Molly. That pastime has become more time-consuming for him; John reckons faking someone’s death and lying about it for a year and a half has a sobering effect on one’s willingness to do favours, not to mention cultivate romantic attachments. Molly doesn’t let him take things out of the lab anymore, so Sherlock spends nights there, running tests and making notes, and doing basically whatever it takes to keep his mind docked in reality while he has no real puzzles to solve.

Texts are sporadic, and random, and mostly of medical persuasion, but nothing Sherlock couldn’t honestly search for on Wikipedia, or just ask Molly if she happened to be around. John reckons this is Sherlock’s way of keeping up a conversation, so he replies when he can, and ignores only half of the questions.

The phone rings at 3 PM on a Thursday. Sherlock never calls him. John looks at the caller ID, but he doesn’t recognise the number.

A shallow, quiet wave of dread passes over him lightning fast and dissipates in a cold shudder. When he answers the phone, his hand is not shaking.

“John Watson.”

“John!” The voice on the other end is not Sherlock’s. John is briefly, and shockingly, disappointed.

“Hi John, this is Martha. I got your number from Detective Inspector Lestrade, sorry if this is…” She pauses, laughs. The sound is pleasant, and triggers a flush of arousal in John. It’s the raspy voice; he’s always been a sucker for those. 

“You know what, scratch that,” she says, and he can hear her smiling. “I’m not sorry. I was just wondering. Would you like to get coffee?”

*

Martha is gorgeous, funny, and rather brilliant. Women like that don’t usually happen to John; he doesn’t let them. Sarah came close, but she’d caught him in an unguarded moment, and that set the precedent for every other interaction they ever had after that. He moved away from her in stages; she recognized that, backed off, and moved on. They might have had a chance, in another life. If Sherlock Holmes had stayed dead.

Martha, on the other hand, is exactly what John needs right now.

She meets him at the door after clinic hours, and they walk together through damp and chilly London until they find a pub that is to their liking. It takes them a while – they have similar tastes, and don’t just pick the first one. Once inside, they get a corner booth and get tea to warm up, because coffee is a euphemism for sex, and tea is a practical matter.

Martha is a pleasant conversationalist, and John finds himself listening with unwavering attention to childhood stories of mischief in the countryside, where she grew up before going to study in Cardiff. She has a curiosity and a hunger for danger that appeals to him, on a very base level. In some respects, he realises as he listens to her describe scars and broken bones, and an investigation she once did with her friend into the disappearance of a pet hamster named Bob, she is a little like Sherlock. If Sherlock could hold a non-crime-related thought for longer than thirty seconds, if he listened as intently as he spoke, and if he were a beautiful woman who smiled at John with all the openness in the world, laying down all the clues on a shiny silver platter for him to peruse.

“You don’t have a case file in that handbag, I hope,” John says, only half-joking, and she fakes indignation, and then smiles, and unzips the bag, holding it open over the table for John to see.

“Just a tiny little bag,” she says. “I’m afraid I have to be very picky with what I put in it.”

She doesn’t have a case file, but there is lipstick, a powder box, a stripe of strawberry-flavoured condoms, and an oblong silk bag, about eight inches long. John blacks out a little bit, and then smiles back at her in what he hopes is a non-threatening manner, but then gives up and shows teeth. Her smile transforms in turn, and they’re grinning at each other like a pair of fools, who are planning to be up to exactly no good whatsoever.

They get hungry, eventually, and they’re in a pub, so they get fish and chips, and a couple of pints, and then more, and around midnight John finds himself taking her back to Baker Street, bumping shoulders as they walk. There is a pleasant warmth in his body, not only thanks to the alcohol. The night has cleared, and the moon hangs giant and low, the patterns of light and shadow on its surface clearly visible to the naked eye. Martha is looking up, too, and they share that, in silence, and John lets himself think that this is an arrangement he can reasonably sustain. Work, and play, and duty, each one separated, and to each their own. Yes, this is what he needs. This is good.

And then they round a corner, and walk down the row of familiar brick houses, quiet and dark in the chilly night, and John glances up at the windows of 221B, and his heart stutters and lodges in his throat.

The lights are out, but one of the windows is open. A small orange light flickers, illuminating Sherlock’s face for a moment, then fades.

John stops.

“What’s wrong?” says Martha, and the playful tone is still in her voice. “Hey, are you going to pass out? Because that would be… hmmm, unfortunate. I have plans for you. And you better be—John?”

John swallows. The warm feeling in his gut has dissipated, and the awareness of the contents of Martha’s bag has receded into mere facts of life, instead of being a sweet promise. In their place is pure physical reaction, Pavlov’s dog, raw sharp instinct. The choice is clear. It’s not even a choice.

He should never have told Sherlock to ditch the bloody cigarettes. Give him ammunition, why don’t you.

“I’m sorry,” he says, but she is quite brilliant, and she knows already, and she straightens up, all of a sudden much more sober than she appeared to be.

“We could be very quiet,” she says, and smiles, but they both know she’s giving him a way out.

“Yeah,” says John. “Not really my thing.”

They stand on the street for a little while, and the two feet of distance between them coalesce into a physical barrier. Another fact of life, thinks John. Even now, in their life after death, no one can compete with Sherlock Holmes.

Martha smiles at him, gently, and winks, and then turns on her heel and walks away. Her bag bumps against her hip.

John gives in to the ordinary pleasure of watching her go. Then he turns round and turns his key in the lock.

*

Sherlock is smoking at the open window of the sitting room, a dark silhouette framed by the moonlight. As dramatic flair goes, thinks John, it doesn’t get more dramatic than this.

John closes and locks the doors. Mrs Hudson is asleep, so they will have to be quiet. He hangs his coat, takes off his shoes, and goes into the bathroom to relieve himself. He thinks about washing up, decides not to – he’s clean enough for what he’s planning to do.

Because John had a plan for this evening. It involved kissing and strawberry condoms, and the contents of an oblong silk bag, but now that has all gone to hell, so he needs to make an adjustment. He wonders briefly how amenable Sherlock would be to strawberry, has he even considered using condoms at all, has it even crossed his mind that—

There is a rustling sound to his right. John looks over. 

Sherlock is wearing his white dress shirt, unbuttoned at the collar, and black suit trousers, ironed razor sharp. No shoes, no socks, and John’s mouth goes dry on command. Fucking predictable.

Sherlock regards him for a moment, and then detaches himself from the doorframe and comes up to stand behind John in front of the bathroom sink. He brings his cigarette to his lips. As provocations go, this one is merely a token. But that is all right, John can work with that. He watches in the mirror as the tip of Sherlock’s cigarette flares up, and then as Sherlock slowly breathes out thin white smoke over John’s hair.

Sherlock’s eyes are transparent and clear. No drugs, no shamming of drugs. Sherlock has made himself fully present, fully in control of his actions. Obviously expecting the night’s entertainment to be more involved than the last one.

He is not wrong.

John holds up his right hand. Sherlock frowns, very briefly, but then he takes the cigarette out of his mouth and puts it between John’s waiting fingers. John holds it, and with his other hand he reaches behind his back, finds Sherlock’s wrist and tugs up. He brings Sherlock’s arm around him, and holds Sherlock’s left hand, palm up, in front of his chest.

Sherlock watches him in the mirror, impassive. His wrist is relaxed in John’s grip. John looks at him, searches for any indication that Sherlock is going to change his mind. There is none. John flips the cigarette in his hand, the tip facing down, towards the vulnerable patch of skin over Sherlock’s pulse, in the open cuff of his shirt. Sherlock’s eyes widen, marginally, but he clamps down on it – John can feel the tension spiral through the body behind him; the shift in Sherlock’s stance telegraphs through the bones of his hand.

John looks down, then, because this is a delicate operation, so he doesn’t see Sherlock’s reaction when he presses the smoking tip of the cigarette over the burn mark on Sherlock’s wrist.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This time in the game of Spot the Reference: Elementary :)


	11. No Duress

The smell of scorched skin. Sherlock’s fingers clawed around empty air. Sherlock’s hand, shaking, wrist immobilized in John’s grip. And Sherlock, tense like wire behind John, trembling, and utterly silent.

John looks up. Sherlock’s eyes are squeezed shut, eyebrows drawn, and his mouth is open, upper lip twisted over bared teeth. John has never seen Sherlock wear an expression like this, and it transcends everything: Sherlock unmade, shattered, unravelling behind John – but still inside his own brain, behind the skin of his eyelids.

John lifts the cigarette and drops it into the toilet. He turns on the tap, pulls Sherlock closer, and runs cold water over his wrist. Sherlock goes where he’s told, folds like paper around John’s body. His eyes are still shut, and he is breathing through his clenched teeth. He is still not making a sound. John lets the water cool Sherlock’s skin for a while, and then he switches his hold on Sherlock’s wrist under the tap, turns in the half-circle of his arms, and fits his left hand against the front of Sherlock’s trousers.

Sherlock wheezes in a lungful of air, and opens his eyes. They’re red, wet, and blurred with confusion.

“What,” he says, and “John,” but John squeezes him, hard, and Sherlock’s eyes crease in pain.

“Shhh, don’t talk now,” says John. He gentles his touch, runs the tips of his fingers up and down Sherlock’s front. Sherlock is hard, and his body responds to the caress, hips straining forward, towards the promise of pleasure.

“God.” John laughs quietly. “You’re completely miswired, aren’t you?”

Sherlock only looks at him, uncomprehending. John lets him go and lays the flat of his hand against Sherlock’s chest.

“Sit down.”

Sherlock folds down, sluggish and uncoordinated, and sits on the edge of the tub. John makes sure he is steady, and then he shuts off the tap and goes to get the first aid kit. 

He cleans and wraps the new wound. Second degree, over existing scar tissue; no new permanent damage. Sherlock will wear the dressing for a few days, and that will be it. John wonders what Greg will infer from this one – he must have seen the original burn mark. Did he ask Sherlock about it?

Did Sherlock tell him?

He puts the first aid kit away, takes a tub of Vaseline out of the medicine cabinet, and sets it on the sink in full view. Should he give Sherlock painkillers now, or later, to help him sleep? Pills take some time to start working. He could break out the good stuff, but he doesn’t want that to become the routine – there are downsides to doing this with an addict.

He turns to Sherlock, who is still sitting on the edge of the tub, frowning at his wrist like the bandage is an alien growth that sprung up when he wasn’t looking.

John touches his shoulder. “All right?”

Sherlock looks at him. His eyes are still confused, but not gone – he’s processing.

“Of course I’m,” he says, and clears his throat. “Of course I’m all right. Why wouldn’t I be all right?”

John nods. Sherlock, off kilter – such a staggering sight. “Do you remember your safeword?”

Sherlock frowns. His eyes flick to the tube on the sink, and then back to John’s face, and John waits for the gears to turn, for the decision-making engine in Sherlock’s head to churn out something reasonable, something approaching self-preservation.

But Sherlock doesn’t say anything. He looks at John, and his eyes are like glass, like still water – transparent, and utterly, perfectly calm, and John’s heart stutters and skips in his chest.

God, talk about completely miswired.

He takes a breath, and he lets Sherlock look at him, look _through_ him, and read whatever he needs to read on John’s face.

_What else have you done, John?_

_Everything. Anything. Anything you would have me do._

After a while, Sherlock looks away. Then he braces his uninjured hand on the sink, gets to his feet, and goes around John and into the bedroom. He is pulling his shirt off as he walks.

*

When Sherlock died on the pavement—

Well, John is not going to think about that.

He remembers the bargaining phase. It had been spectacular. John dreamt of the roof, and the fall, to the tune of _if only_. If only he understood, if only he’d been less subservient, if only he didn’t listen. Sometimes, he dreamt of moving faster, and catching, and holding tight enough. He dreamt of dropping the phone the second he saw Sherlock on the edge of the roof, and of running, not heeding what Sherlock wanted, not giving into the command. Rarely, he dreamt of flying, the same way he dreamt of doing field surgery with state-of-the art equipment.

But mostly, he dreamt about losing control. About constantly running out of bandages and antiseptic, about pulling a piece of sterile gauze out of his pack only to find it soiled and old and crawling with worms; he dreamt about trying to push Sherlock’s insides back into his belly with dirty hands, his own blunt fingers chasing new fissures across Sherlock’s chest; about sharp ribs tearing skin and breaking like sugar sticks. It made no sense, and John knew that it made no sense, these weren’t even the right injuries – but London was a battlefield just like any other, so he tried anyway.

He would wake up drenched and exhausted, every time, after a dream like that. Sometimes, he would cry, until the world phased itself back into alignment. Sometimes, he would just lie there. And then he would get out of bed and face another day, same as the last.

So no, John is not going to think about that.

*

He starts with Sherlock’s feet, the way he knows Sherlock wants him to.

He followed Sherlock into the bedroom, tossed the lube onto the sheets. Sherlock’s eyes flicked to it again, and then Sherlock was unbuttoning his trousers and letting them fall to the floor, and pulling at the waistband of his pants until he was naked, gloriously naked in the dark, and John had excellent night vision, but he went and switched on the single lamp on the nightstand so he could really see.

Sherlock stood in the middle of the room for a while, blinking, waiting for John’s direction. When John said nothing, Sherlock finally deferred to the rules, and went to the bed, and made himself comfortable there, stretched out on his belly, head resting on his folded arms, face turned towards the light. John took off his own clothes, item by item, folded them and set them on a chair, and climbed in after Sherlock.

He sits now, at the foot of the bed, palms shaping the bones of Sherlock’s ankles under the unbroken skin. The air is a bit chilly for this, and he longs to stretch himself out along Sherlock’s back, fit himself into the dip and curve of his spine, fold the covers over them and just _stay like that_.

This is cheating, he thinks, this being naked with Sherlock – he could have left his clothes on and achieved the same end result. But the problem – his ultimate problem – is that this likely _is_ the end result. There is not much escalation John can do after tonight – not without doing permanent damage. He isn’t that much into bloodletting, asphyxiation or bondage, and there are only so many accessories he’s used efficiently in the bedroom. There is a reason he has not gone career, and there is a reason he ultimately manages to hold onto at least _some_ of his girlfriends.

He thinks about doing this quickly. Get it over with – the objective is to add to Sherlock’s catalogue of sensations, and not to indulge in his own. But if this is the end of the line, if Sherlock gets his fill after this, and drops the matter as he eventually drops everything else, then John will at least have stolen this moment, lived through it when he had the chance. Sherlock is still not talking, obedient to the letter, so John can conjure up any scenario he wants, think up any fantasy he likes.

So he will cheat tonight, he decides. He will cheat in this, here, with Sherlock. He will cheat and he will be naked, and he will indulge in some stolen sensations – and if he can, he will do this right.

He slides his hands slowly up Sherlock’s calves. Sparse hair, warm skin, delicate in the dips behind Sherlock’s knees. Sherlock’s toes twitch when John touches him there; ticklish – interesting, and oh, how disarmingly normal. John gets up onto his knees, slides his hands up over Sherlock’s thighs, digs his thumbs into muscle. Sherlock’s eyelids flutter. John moves his hands up and down and around, palms shaping to the tops of Sherlock’s thighs, then up over the swell of his buttocks. He moves his thumbs in tight circles, massaging the skin where the sciatic nerves radiate down Sherlock’s legs. It’s relaxing. Sherlock is letting him do this, and not saying a word. The lube lies untouched on the sheets, next to Sherlock’s bent elbow. 

John gets harder in stages. He doesn’t really want to. But the contrast of his warm flush to Sherlock’s cool paleness is too enticing, so he angles his hips, leans over, and trails wetness across Sherlock’s dry skin. Sherlock lets out a puff of air, and John glances up. Sherlock’s eyes are still closed, but his mouth is open.

John shivers, lets his eyes fall shut for a second. Images in bright Technicolor burn under his eyelids.

 _Sherlock wants this_. John has arranged the scene, and Sherlock is playing along. Informed consent. Stated rules of engagement. John leans over and reaches for the lube.

Sherlock shifts underneath him, pushes his leg up to bring one knee to the side. John doesn’t let him – with his knees on either side of Sherlock’s hips, he sits back on Sherlock’s legs. _This is how we’re going to do this_. Sherlock stills. He opens his eyes and blinks, like he’s calculating, but then he relaxes again, and his eyes fall shut. John rubs his fingers together, warming the slick, and then slides his hand over Sherlock’s tailbone and down between his buttocks.

Sherlock makes a sound, soft like _Oh_ , but not quite articulated, and curls his fingers against his mouth.

John preps him slowly, using his index finger and then his thumb. Sherlock makes sounds throughout, soft little breaths and gasps, and bites at his own fingertips. John’s hand is trembling, and he is getting lightheaded; it won’t take long, not with Sherlock hot and loose-limbed and pliant like this. John looks down, at the familiar, unfathomable, insane movement of his thumb, in and out, in and out, over slick skin, and _never in a million years, Jesus Christ._

And then he can’t, not anymore. He pulls his thumb out, braces on the mattress, aligns his hips, and, guiding himself with his left hand, pushes in.

Sherlock seizes up and clamps down on him, tight – God, so tight. He gasps out something that could be John’s name, but it morphs into a breathless groan and then a sharp inhalation. John braces with both arms on the bed, waits, then pulls out a bit – so good, so, _so very good_ – and then he rolls his hips and pushes back in.

And God, he could do this all night. Slow, like this, in and out, this other kind of rhythm he could fall into, so, so easy. So easy, this back-and-forth, and so unbearably good. It’s been a while since he’s done it like this, this careful and slow, in this particular arrangement of limbs, and now, with this impossible man, letting him do impossible things, he could do this forever.

Sherlock is saying something. 

John resurfaces, tries to listen over the thunder of blood in his ears.

“John,” Sherlock says and then, “Oh,” weak, like he’s having a heart attack. “John. Oh, _God_.”

“Yes,” says John, hissing in air through his teeth. “Yes.” He rolls his hips, slow, slow and deep, and it’s so good, oh God, it’s bloody _fantastic._

“John,” Sherlock says, and he laughs a little, but his voice is strained, like he can’t breathe right. “John,” he says. “It hurts.” And he sounds surprised.

John breathes out, and stops moving. Arms braced on either side of Sherlock’s shoulders, he looks down at the tight press of their hips. Sherlock’s body has gone rigid against him. He is trembling all over.

John doesn’t pull out. Careful not to move his hips, he bends his elbows, and folds himself along Sherlock’s back. Sherlock’s skin is cool and clammy, not at all what John hoped for when they started, but it doesn’t matter – John can warm him up with his own flushed belly and chest.

He distributes his weight evenly across Sherlock’s back, props his chin on Sherlock’s shoulder, and breathes into his ear. “Are you all right?”

Sherlock doesn’t reply. John can feel Sherlock’s frantic heartbeat through his own chest, and down low, his own pulse within Sherlock’s body. Sherlock’s eyes are open wide, fixed somewhere left of the lamp, but his attention isn’t anywhere close. John waits a little while, and then he places an apologetic kiss on Sherlock’s shoulder, and rolls his hips, once, hard.

Sherlock keens like he’s been lashed, and sinks his teeth into his lower lip.

“Tell me,” says John. Slowly, he begins to pull out, coils his hips into another descent. He kisses Sherlock’s shoulder again.

“Stop,” says Sherlock, quickly. “Please stop.”

*

If John were a better man, he would have normal feelings.

Concern, longing, joy. Empathy for his friend. Forgiveness for his bad choices.

If John were a better man, he would sleep soundly at night, and during the day he would heal people. He would conduct the occasional ray of light, endure the occasional stakeout, and now and then acquire an accidental plus-one. He would live on Chinese and adrenaline spikes. He’d be happy.

John is not a better man anymore.

*

He holds himself motionless against Sherlock’s back. Mouth on Sherlock’s shoulder, arms bracketing his body, hips angled just so, he maps out the quickest way to incapacitate a man in this position. It is fairly straightforward. John knows a variety of chokeholds, and he has no problem overpowering taller people – he likes it; it’s why he tends to pick taller partners, it’s why he has no issues pulling rank. There is power in being underestimated while you judge your opponent precisely; it’s the oldest trick in the book, and John had to learn very early.

He breathes against Sherlock’s skin. He could do it. He could slip his arm around Sherlock’s neck, under his arm, and pull. He’d have to absorb the first shockwave of fight, and ride it out until it turned into submission, but that would not be a problem. Yes, he could do it, easy: take away Sherlock’s air and his leverage, and then take what has already been offered, but on his own bloody terms for a change. The need swells in him, the dark thrill of knowing exactly how far he could take this, the awareness of how much he could do.

“John,” says Sherlock, and John opens his eyes.

Sherlock is looking at him sideways over his shoulder. There is sweat beading over his upper lip. His lush, perfectly bowed upper lip.

“I’m,” Sherlock says, and clears his throat. “I think I’m fine now. You can proceed.”

And John can’t help it – he laughs. It spills out of his lungs like acid, tears out of his chest like it’s grown claws. It feels like a hole has opened up where his heart used to be. It hurts. But the darkness leaves him, the need fizzles out like a match, and the rational part of his brain, the one he’s been actively not listening to for the past half an hour, manages to squeeze in a thought.

He pulls out with a gasp and rolls off Sherlock, away to the other side of the bed. He throws his arm over his eyes.

“You haven’t,” he says. “Jesus. You haven’t, before now.”

Sherlock is quiet for a very long time.

“No,” he says, at last. “Not in the way you would consider... applicable.”

John shudders.

“Applicable,” he says. It is very dark under his eyelids.

Sherlock puffs out a breath.

“Penetrative sex,” he says. “With… other people. Or… objects.”

“Please,” says John. “Please. Let’s not.”

They lie next to each other, just breathing. John thinks about the cacophony of clues.

Sherlock can imitate normal social behaviour. He is nothing short of masterful in emulating grief, sadness, or even charming stupidity, if it helps in a case. He cuts a fine figure in well-tailored clothes, because he knows exactly what effect it has on the majority of people. He can slip open a button, bend his neck or curl his bare toes, and they’re all nothing but instruments he uses to achieve his goal. It’s all _transport._

John moves his arm away, blinks in the lamplight.

Sherlock is still on his stomach, his face turned to John, his eyes calm and unreadable again. This close, John can see gooseflesh on the skin of his arm. Sherlock’s body is not trembling anymore – he’s relaxed, but he hasn’t changed the arrangement of his limbs. John deliberately doesn’t look down, can’t afford to follow the soft curve of Sherlock’s back with his eyes.

Sherlock uses his body like an instrument, and he wields it very precisely. Anyone would be fooled.

Anyone.

John swallows. His throat feels like it’s full of gravel.

“So. What _have_ you done?”

Sherlock looks at him. John can see a slow progression of thought, like a numbered list unfurling behind Sherlock’s eyes. Then Sherlock blinks, and the look disappears.

“What does it matter?” he says, quietly. 

“It.” John clears his throat. “It does matter. To me.”

Sherlock watches him. “You’ve slept with multiple women. A few men.” His voice is low, but there is no accusation in it – merely a statement of fact. “I haven’t. Aside from the obvious disparity of experience, what difference does it really make? Would you have done anything else to me? Treated me differently? Hurt me a little bit less?” The corner of his mouth twitches. “It’s not who you are. You don’t pull your punches, so why would I make you do anything but what comes naturally to you? You said—” Sherlock pauses, bites his lip. His eyes blur for a second, then clear. Eidetic memory. He fixes John with a direct stare, brow furrowed.

“You think I don’t understand,” he says, slowly, like he's processing as he goes. “You think sentiment— You think sentiment is beyond my comprehension. A fictional idea, made up by the lesser minds to make them feel more secure in the world where everybody dies alone. After all this—After all this you still think I don’t understand what I did.”

Sherlock’s eyes are calm and clear, and his voice is painfully honest – but he is watching John intently, like he’s reading the clues, like he’s waiting for the smallest emotion to surface and direct what he’s going to say next, and John feels a sudden and irrational fury at this perfect mimicry of normal human behaviour.

Yes, Sherlock knows what he did to John. Yes, he had good reasons to do it. Yes, he has seen John’s sodding list. And yet.

_You would never kill yourself, John. You are not allowed._

“I understand, John,” says Sherlock, still in that perfect honest voice, and John wants to cry. He wants to tear Sherlock apart.

He wrenches his eyes away, looks at the ceiling. He is beginning to get cold. He is not shivering. He has reached a plateau – some weird internal balance of chemistry, of outside temperature versus internal combustion. 

Sherlock would be getting cold, too. He was sweating, earlier. The room is too chilly for this, for any of this. John should get up, get his clothes. He should get Sherlock painkillers.

“I know this doesn’t make it even,” says Sherlock, and he sounds thoughtful, like there’s an actual process behind what he is going to say. “I know it doesn’t make up for what I did. Nothing will. What is fifty lashes to sixteen months, not even if you multiply it by—” He draws in a breath, shifts closer, and John closes his eyes.

“I agreed to this, John,” Sherlock says. “I consented. You’d do well to remember that.”

John won’t look. He wishes he could make himself not listen, not _comprehend._

Perfect mimicry of human behaviour. Sherlock, throwing himself on a sword – or more aptly, on a belt, on a whip, into John’s bed, into his hurting hands – because this, after all, this is all _math._

_What can I possibly say to convince you to put last year behind us and bloody move on._

“Sherlock.” John clears his throat. “This is not about getting even. This is not about your consent. I—”

God, he has no way to say this. Because how do you say anything like this to an impossible man? _How is it in your funny little brains?_ This is how it is, Sherlock. Complicated. Loving people is not a mathematical formula. Fixing people is not like a puzzle. Cutting your loved ones out of your life when they become a liability is not a _logical course of action._

John doesn’t have normal feelings. Not anymore. They died after a short, but _oh so spectacular_ flight. They died with a slam and a dramatic flip, and this is something you just cannot undo.

There is a touch on his shoulder. John startles, and turns to look.

“You want me to fight,” says Sherlock. There is a gleam in his eye, and his voice has dropped into that lower register he uses when he wants to get straight to your gut. His fingertips brush John’s shoulder, at the edge of his scar. 

“Do you want me to fight it, John?” he says, shifting closer. “Is that what you’d like?” His breath is warm on John’s neck, now, and John can’t help it, he does look down the curve of Sherlock’s back, along the line of his body, at his limbs shifting slowly on the sheets. It’s mesmerising.

Sherlock moves very close. 

“In your hotel room,” he says, dangerous and low, and straight into John’s ear, and even if John had no inclination whatsoever towards men, this voice would send him spiralling into oblivion. This is not Sherlock’s voice, although it comes out of his throat, but it’s a perfect persona: Sherlock high as a kite and breathless with need. Sherlock high on arousal.

“You—” he says, and John hears him swallow. “You wanted to rip me apart. Dislocate my jaw, break my nose, drive your fist into my gut. Make me crawl and beg forgiveness for what I had done. Did you, John? Did you think of beating me right then and there, making me bleed all over your hands?” 

The litany of imagined violence passes before John’s eyes like a roll of film. John doesn't want to look. But Sherlock pauses, as if giving John time to enjoy it – perhaps he has a roll of film all his own – and John has no other choice. He doesn’t want to look, but the film is already in his head, and he can’t stop watching.

“I wanted you to,” murmurs Sherlock. “I _needed_ you to. You could have—Oh, you could have done anything to me. You could have broken my nose and knocked out my teeth and then told me to go to my knees, right there, and I would have.” Sherlock breathes out, perfectly shaky, like he can’t keep it contained; like he means it. “I would have gone to my knees for you, if you wanted, and you could have taken me.” He makes a sound, soft and needy, and one half of John marvels as the exact precision and timing of that sound, while the other tumbles straight down into sin.

“You could have taken me right there, and I would have let you. Force me, hurt me, do whatever you want to me. Would you have liked that?” One more breath, and that voice, barely above a whisper now. “Do you ever think about that? I do. I think about that every day, I—”

Sherlock shifts, curls his fingers against John’s shoulder. The scrape of nails is miniscule, but focussing, grounding.

“In Lisbon—” says Sherlock. “There was an assassin, and I—Doesn’t matter. I was—”

Speech scatters, and Sherlock falls silent, breathing against John’s neck.

Superb performance, thinks John. God. The execution – flawless, the ending – masterful. Sherlock, struggling to make words, overwhelmed by his own desires.

John doesn’t say anything. He can’t. They lie in silence for a little while. Then Sherlock shifts again.

“What do you want?” His voice is barely a murmur. “I will do whatever you want, John.” And he touches his soft, wet, perfect mouth to the crest of John’s shoulder.

John shudders. Sherlock drags his lips slowly across his skin, and John can’t help it – he rolls his hands into fists.

This is wrong. Sherlock is kissing him, honest-to-God kissing him right now – and John wanted this, God, he wanted this, Sherlock in his bed, touching him under no obligation or duress, with nothing but the expectation of pleasure – but this, this is all backwards, because Sherlock is kissing down John’s arm, and lifting his head to John’s chest now, and John doesn’t even know the taste of his mouth.

John raises his hands, tangles them in Sherlock’s hair, and pulls his head up, sharp. Sherlock goes, with barely any resistance, and John looks into his glassy eyes and wants nothing else but to taste him, to take his mouth and kiss it, kiss him until they both hurt, until he’s had his fill of it – and then rip him open, and make him bleed all over again.

And he knows Sherlock can see that, because his mouth curls up at the corners, and there’s that twist of the lip, that self-satisfied smirk that makes John want to throw a punch and keep punching, and this is worse than the hotel, worse than that disastrous dinner, this is worse than anything, because he knows Sherlock _wants it._

John exhales a long, shuddering breath, and tightens his fist. It feels good to be in control again, it feels good to be the one deciding what happens – and especially now that he’s decided to take the last decision out of Sherlock’s hands; when he’s realised he doesn’t have to let _Sherlock_ end this.

“You want to know what I want?” he says. His voice sounds alien to his own ears. Sherlock looks drunk, positively high, and John knew, he knew there were downsides of doing this with an addict.

“Well, I’ll tell you what I want right now.”

Sherlock’s mouth is open. His breathing is ragged, like saying those things was difficult; like it _cost_ him. But he is listening now. His body looks coiled, strung like wire, and he really is very beautiful, lying like that on the sheets, neck arched, pale skin, and the white bandage on his wrist. John feels something ragged unwrap in his chest, constricting his breathing. God, even now, he’s lost.

“I want us,” he says, and clears his throat, because this needs saying correctly. “I want us to be back to the way we were.”


	12. The Way We Were

It rains. Sad, worthless trickles of water rolling down the glass, the streets bleak under the heavy sky. Inside, bright fluorescents hold the illusion of day, and the dual-coloured walls, oil-painted to keep sanitation standards high, clash stubbornly with the rest of the décor. Cheerfully explicit diagrams of the human body, with the complexity of tissues turned inside out and annotated in miniscule font, advertise the fragility of human existence. 

John sits at his desk over a pile of half-finished post-appointment paperwork and stares out at the sky. 

He can barely remember the day, much less half of his patients. He stares out the window and thinks about the fireplace in 221B, about the November rains, about the slow coming of Christmas. The lights along Oxford and Regent are up. He could go out today, after work. He could take an umbrella and go for a walk, or find a pub, and sit there for a while. It would be just like last year, except this time, his eyes wouldn’t be blurry, and his thoughts could safely go back to the fireplace in 221B, and take comfort in knowing Sherlock’s chair is still there, and it’s not empty anymore.

He reckons that would contribute greatly to his healing.

He looks down at the papers. He has no idea what he was going to write.

Sherlock stayed in his bedroom for half an hour after John had left. John, in his bed upstairs, listened to the sounds in the vents, and floated on helpful waves of gentle chemistry taking over his brain. He thought he heard laughter, at some point, as if Sherlock found John’s refusal inevitably amusing, and then shortly after, the floorboards creaked, and the bedroom door banged against the wall.

Sherlock didn’t come up to his room. John had thrown the bolt on the door just in case, but it seemed the conversation was over.

Thank God.

Dawn came three hours later, way too early for his melatonin-muddled brain. John raised his leaden head from the pillows, blinked away the remnants of sleep and got dressed in yesterday’s clothes. He came downstairs, noted the empty sitting room and a mess of samples and notes on the kitchen table, made himself an insanely strong coffee, and went to work.

The day has been a long stretch of nothing.

He thought he would feel better now, he honestly did. There it was, a short chapter in their life, and now it was behind them. If that’s what it took to put the last year and a half to rest, then so be it – nothing with Sherlock had ever been easy. And John felt so light, after, so giddy with his clear and unequivocal refusal; he hoped the feeling would last more than a few hours.

He doesn’t feel light anymore.

There is a knock on the door.

“Yes,” says John, and he clears his throat. “Yes?”

Emily pokes her head into the office. She has her hat on. She’s leaving for the evening.

“Can you take one more today, John?” She sounds apologetic, but for some reason she’s smiling, and John would bet a substantial sum of money that Josh is hovering somewhere on the other side of the door.

“Is Doctor Carter out already?” He barely remembers his own name. It’s really not a good idea to be treating anyone in this state.

Emily smiles again. “You’re the only one left. It’s way past... I can send him to A&E, but it doesn’t look that bad.”

John stands. Injury, she means there’s an injury. “It’s fine, I’ll look at it. Show him in.”

She backs off, leaves the door open. John goes over to the sink to wash his hands. Injuries, he thinks, are interesting. They break the routine, get him something productive to accomplish.

There’s a shuffling of steps, Emily saying something, and then her voice drifts away, along with her footsteps, and another set of (heavier) footsteps to match. The door clicks closed, and John turns round.

Double vision. His brain stutters. His breath breaks.

Blood and black hair and that coat. _Jesus Christ, no._

Sherlock catches him before he sinks to the floor. It hurts, the hands gripping his shoulders, staining his shirt with blood. _Why the hell is there blood? God, what is this? Why is this—_

“John,” Sherlock says, and he _shakes_ him, and it bloody _hurts_. “For God’s sake, John, get a grip!”

John gets a grip. He blinks. The blood in Sherlock’s hair doesn’t go away.

“The light bulb exploded,” says Sherlock. “In the kitchen. We were out of supplies.”

John wheezes in a breath. Sherlock’s eyes are transparent and grim and intense. There is a smudge of blood on his cheek, a few nicks on his forehead.

“Light bulb,” says John.

“Yes.” Sherlock nods. Something shiny flickers in his hair. Shard of glass. Jesus. “I was measuring the accumulation of ice crystals on—ah, not important. I got most of it out, but the light in the bathroom is too weak for me to see—I’m fine, I just.”

Sherlock bites his lip. John looks at him. There is a hollowness at the bottom of his stomach. A trickle of blood trails behind Sherlock’s ear and down his neck, sinking into the collar of his shirt. Dark red stain. Head wounds bleed. John knows that head wounds bleed. Disproportionally to the injury. Sherlock is fine.

He is fine.

John steps back. He takes a breath, consciously relaxes, and reminds himself that he is a medical professional. He can do this.

“Where.” He clears his throat. “Where else? You know, just—take off your coat, let me see. And sit on that table, over there. Let me clean you up.”

*

It takes a while to fish out all the pieces of glass out of Sherlock’s hair, to clean the wounds on his face and his forearms. He was working at the kitchen table, sleeves rolled up. Rubber gloves and goggles, thank God, otherwise he might not be able to see. He’s done an acceptable job of cleaning out the worst of it, but then he ran out of light, antiseptic and patience.

John is, as always, convenient.

“Hold still.”

They make up a familiar tableau. Sherlock, sitting half-folded on the exam table in his blood-stained shirt and pressed trousers, head bowed, one leg on the floor, the other dangling, bracketing John’s hips, and John, leaning over, combing through Sherlock’s hair with his gloved fingertips and a pair of pliers. John has allowed himself the luxury of not thinking for about fifteen minutes, but now he can’t help becoming acutely aware of the heat of Sherlock’s body, the sickly cigarette smell of his hair, mixed with his mint shampoo.

He can’t shake it, even as he fishes out the last miniscule shard. The wounds are real. Not serious, but real. Real enough that this could not have been deliberate. Sherlock would not injure himself like this; it’s inconsistent with his pattern. It’s John who is made to hurt him, after Sherlock winds him up like a toy, and then watches him unwind in unforeseen and exciting directions. Sherlock doesn’t wind him up and then ground him; that would be counterproductive.

Maybe he’s changing tactics.

Maybe he’s decided that now they will do the aftercare before, and not _after._

They were supposed to be _done._

“At which point?”

John starts, and almost drops the pliers.

“Sorry, what?” He shakes the glass shard into the bin and sets the pliers on the instrument tray.

“You said you wanted to go back to the way we were,” says Sherlock. His head is still bowed, and his eyes are fixed on the floor. “The way we were at which point?”

John picks up cotton swabs and antiseptic.

“You are aware,” he says slowly, “that it doesn’t actually involve going back in time?”

Sherlock huffs, and then hisses as John swipes at a cut at the top of his scalp.

“I am capable of parsing the metaphor, yes.”

John throws away the used swab, gets another.

“Before,” he says, and has to take a breath, because it’s been almost two years, but the memory of that too-sharp, childlike face still makes him seasick. “Before Moriarty.”

Sherlock is quiet for some time. John combs through his hair, cleans the cuts one by one. He drags the cotton down the side of Sherlock’s neck, cleans the dried-up trickle there. Sherlock exhales – nerve endings, not pain – and tilts his head to the side, giving John more room.

“That isn’t really much of a time slice.”

John scoffs. “What do you mean? That’s tons of time.”

Sherlock turns and looks at him, eyes calm and serious.

“James Moriarty was in our lives since the very first day we met. He was in my life even before that. There was never a time when he wasn’t there.” He swallows. “Unless you mean—”

Sherlock looks like him like he’s realised something painfully obvious, and is now waiting for John to catch up. John has no idea what that would be. He’s always been crap at lying to Sherlock, but he can do a blank expression if there is nothing behind it but an actual blank.

“Unless I mean what?” he says.

Sherlock’s eyes narrow. Then his mouth thins and he looks away.

“Nothing.” He licks his lips. “Pick a moment, John. And please, _do_ pick precisely.”

*

In the end, they settle on the one with the aluminium crutch. By that time, they’ve shared the flat for a while, they smelled the chlorine and lived, Sherlock was taking cases with regularity both from the Met and the public, and John had made them famous enough that they earned significant sums. They weren’t exactly happy, but there was an equilibrium in those days, and Moriarty seemed a great distance away. 

Sherlock seems to be content with that. When John is done disinfecting his cuts and wrapping gauze around both his forearms – just for tonight, to keep the wounds clean – Sherlock tugs his sleeves down, throws on his coat and stands there, texting, until John sets the unfinished paperwork on the to-do pile and turns off the lights.

They spend the next eleven hours solving a cold case, because there has been a new murder and Greg connected the dots – Sherlock is pleased, although he doesn’t say it – and now they have piles upon piles of crime scene photos to shuffle through, trying to find a lead.

They know there is a connection. There are marks on the bodies, in identical places, carved out with a very sharp knife, all in varying geometric shapes. It’s to make it interesting, says Sherlock, offhandedly, when John asks him about it. John doesn’t ask more. He knows Sherlock’s definition of interesting. He doesn’t need it repeated.

It is John who spots the key detail at around four in the morning. Knowledge of anatomy, tendons under the skin – whoever made these was not just a random Picasso wannabe.

“Sherlock,” is all he says, and Sherlock knows he’s got something real, just like that, from the tone of John’s tired voice.

They spend the next day riding around London in cabs.

*

After the case is solved, they go to dinner. They pass their new Thai place, and John is briefly confused, but he frowns and follows – he always frowns and follows – and Sherlock leads him through the late night streets, under the Christmas lights, until they round the corner into Northumberland Street, and John feels something loosen in his chest, and he laughs, because Sherlock is taking things literally again. Sherlock looks at him with an amused smirk, and doesn’t say anything, because he doesn’t have to.

Angelo gets them a candle for the table and dinner on the house. He smiles at Sherlock, cheerful as ever, but there is a sadness in his eyes John hasn’t seen before. It’s been a year and a half, remembers John, and then he chooses to forget all about it and eat his linguini.

Sherlock twirls his pasta on his fork and doesn’t eat. He does, however, partake in the bottle of red wine, so when they leave, the world is pleasantly fuzzy, Sherlock has a healthy blush on his face, and they both walk slow, warm on the inside on the chilly evening. The night sky is overcast, lighter after yesterday’s rain, but with a promise of more.

At home, John lights the fire and picks up a book, and Sherlock opens the cupboards and lays out lab equipment and tools on the kitchen table, which is now lit by a standing lamp. It’s not enough light to work, but Sherlock has just solved a case, and he doesn’t have another.

They don’t talk. After a while, John begins nodding off to his book, so he folds it and gets up, and then stands for some time in the kitchen doorway.

Sherlock’s skin is pale in the lamplight, his blush gone. He is holding a small glass object – the remains of the fluorescent light bulb? – in a pair of pliers, and looking at it from the side, as if to see how it gleams. There are other pieces, arranged in the middle of the table like remains of an airplane crash in an investigation hangar. Sherlock appears completely engrossed, and he doesn’t look at John, doesn’t say anything when John remains standing there for long minutes, just watching him work.

John remembers Sherlock crying out under the stroke of the whip. Sherlock, undone. Sherlock, succumbing to sensation. Sherlock, seeking out pain like it was something good, something enticing, and trusting John to deliver. 

And now it’s nothing new, really, John thinks. Just another thing that they did. Just another side of the complex human being that is his friend, his brilliant, impossible, insane, exhilarating friend, and for a small, precious slice in time, John got to touch him; for a few glorious moments, John was _inside him_.

“Goodnight,” says John, and then he goes upstairs without waiting for a reply.

*

John Watson, as a general rule, does not resort to violence to resolve personal disputes.

John Watson, with a steady hand a light heart, killed a man for Sherlock Holmes on their very first case.

John Watson, of Fifth Northumberland Fusiliers, skilled field surgeon, shamelessly overqualified GP, currently bleeding out in the basement of a nondescript residential house in Croydon, having fallen down a very steep flight of stairs.

Funny, how those things turn out.

*

John has a bad feeling about this one.

It’s another cold case, Greg being on a roll, and connecting random kidnappings all over London to a case from fourteen years ago. Greg doesn’t like this one, either. It has to do with children. Greg doesn’t like the ones with children, but then again, nobody does.

Sherlock is, as always, indifferent.

They dig through paperwork, enhance photos, and Sherlock re-does the entire set of forensics in one night. John hovers around the edges, feeling amped up and useless, getting Sherlock coffee and crisps, and he can’t shake the feeling they’ve been here before, except it was a chocolate factory and two poisoned kids, and not five boys who have never been found.

In the end, Sherlock does find the one clue that matters, not in brick dust and flowers, but in hospital bills in the name of John F. Murray, and the death certificate of same, two months ago.

The house of John F. Murray stands, theoretically, unoccupied, and in an area that is generally deemed undesirable housing – so when John and Sherlock pay the abandoned residence a visit, they expect, realistically, to find nothing more than five graves.

They find three. In the backyard, the ground has not been disturbed for years, but Sherlock finds the sites with an unerring precision of a trained bloodhound. The evening light is almost gone, and John can barely see his own hands, but Sherlock has a set of lock picks he can operate by memory alone.

Inside, there is a stairwell, and a whisper from the dark – such a small, small whisper that John at first thinks he imagined the voice – and John is turning and shining his torch upon a very small, very frightened face.

“It’s all right,” he says, with the smile of John Watson the trustworthy physician. “You’re safe now, I’m with the police.”

Except he is not exactly _with_ the police. No, because Sherlock neglected to mention the address to Greg after they were done in the lab. Sherlock, who is stomping carelessly upstairs, raining dust on John’s face, so that John has to blink—

Being hit in the back of the head and bouncing off the doorframe happens so fast that his brain properly identifies the sensations when John is already at the bottom of the stairs, in the basement. A door bangs from above, there’s a high-pitched, cut-off, little boy’s scream, and John blinks to himself in the darkness and is about to curse and charge back upstairs—

His legs give out like butter, like he’s forgotten how to make them move. Denial kicks in, and he tries again, but it’s not working. Nothing seems to work. Nothing hurts, either, so he pats himself down, reflexively looking for the leak, because he knows he must find one even before he consciously understands why.

His hands become wet and slick at some point, but he’s not able to tell when. He doesn’t remember what he was looking for. It’s dark. He recalls somebody shouting, and why would they shout if this is only a dream, and his bed is so heavy and so cold, and he is so tired.


	13. Acts of God

He dreams of being locked in a freezer. He is trying to move his hands and feet, but they’ve been encased in blocks of ice. Nearby, Sherlock is kneeling in the white frost, trying his lock picks on the heavy door, but every time he touches the cold metal, his fragile tools freeze and shatter with a singing sound. He tries again, grim and determined, and John can see panic bleeding into the calm lines of his face.

He doesn’t care. The only thing he wants is to take Sherlock’s scarf, and wrap it around his own neck to keep warm. He says so, and Sherlock ignores him, and John feels himself freezing to death while Sherlock breaks one useless lock pick after another.

*

When he wakes up, the world is fuzzy and grey and watered down around the edges, and the nausea at the bottom of his throat is vague one moment, and then rises swift and steady, and he’s vomiting through the back of his nose, over his chin and onto his chest.

Someone cleans him up, efficiently and quickly, with gentle but decisive hands he associates, correctly, with nurses. The smell of hospital is everywhere, in his mouth, in his brain, in his _ears_. He recognizes he is not processing correctly. He wonders what his face looks like. He wonders why he can’t feel his legs. 

His throat burns, and it’s painful to breathe. He doesn’t want to sleep. Something, _someone_ tells him he shouldn’t sleep.

He drifts off anyway.

*

When he comes to the second time, the black blur in the corner of his eye shifts, becomes larger, and blocks out his view of the light. John wants to tell it to go away – he is not ready to die, not yet – and at the same time it fascinates him, that death would come for him in person. That’s never happened before, at the roadside, in the chopper, in the army hospital. He wonders if she indeed carries a scythe.

He blinks, tries to clear the crusts over his eyes. His hand comes up tethered to tubes and lines. He swipes ineffectually at his face; he doesn’t have the coordination. Painkillers? His body feels heavy, bloated with cold water. Hydration. Saline in his veins.

“Stop that,” says an irritated voice from his left, and his wrist is immobilized in a warm, tight grip. “You’ll pull the tape.”

Focus returns, and John stops struggling.

_Sherlock_ , he says, but nothing comes out of his injured throat.

“Yes,” says Sherlock. “Don’t talk. And don’t fall asleep again, you have a concussion.”

_I know_ , says John, because he does. He lies back on the pillows. Sherlock’s shadow moves away.

John blinks at the ceiling, then slowly turns his head to the side. There is pressure behind his eyes, threatening to spill if he moves too quickly.

Sherlock is sitting in a chair by the bed. There is no one else in the room. Daylight seeps in through the window. Early morning.

_How long_ , says John.

“Eleven hours.” Sherlock is still wearing his coat. He doesn’t have a scythe. His hands are empty; there isn’t even a phone. “You were hit on the head, stabbed, and pushed down a flight of stairs. You were unconscious for twenty six minutes, and medicated after that. Do you remember anything?”

John thinks about the small, frightened face. The torch light in the darkness. Was that real, or did he make it up? He remembers the basement, but there is nothing after that, just a long stretch of dark. If he woke up in the ambulance, or in the A&E, he’s lost those hours.

He wants to shake his head, thinks better of it. The headache is mild, but it hangs above him like a warning. He closes his eyes.

“Don’t,” says Sherlock. “Open your eyes, John. Look at me.”

You don’t have to wake me, thinks John, irritably. I can sleep with a concussion. I need rest.

“Open your eyes.” says Sherlock. “John.”

Oh, fine. John opens his eyes.

Sherlock leans back, looking content. There is dust in his hair, and on his coat. His hands, where he’s drumming them against the metal armrest, are dirty. A bit of torn gauze is sticking out of one cuff.

John clears his throat.

“How long have you been here?” His voice comes out scratchy, but it does come out. It’s good to hear his own voice.

Sherlock looks at him, and his eyes are a blank: not calm, not concerned, not even bored. John hasn’t seen Sherlock with blank eyes before.

“They wouldn’t let me give you blood,” says Sherlock. He is looking straight at John, but his voice carries no inflection – no reproach, no discontent, just facts.

John smiles, faintly. Sherlock’s stare is beginning to unnerve him. “You’re a drug addict, Sherlock. Of course they wouldn’t let you give blood.”

Sherlock looks at him some more, and then he lifts his chin and looks away, like he’s irritated by John’s display of logic. Good. Maybe he’ll stop pestering John to stay awake.

God, what if he keeps waking me in the middle of the night? John imagines creative ways in which Sherlock would keep him from falling asleep: playing golf in the sitting room, random kitchen explosions, screeching midnight sonatas on the violin. Sherlock has range. John shudders.

“I’m clean,” says Sherlock. He is looking at the colourless modern art on the wall – still life, with a hint of white apple shapes. “I’ve been clean for… a while now. And I have been tested.” His upper lip curls over his teeth. “ _Extensively._ You are safe.”

Sherlock is looking away, and John looks at him, and he can’t help it – he imagines, he _remembers_ that slow, inexorable push inside. It feels like ages, eons ago. He remembers he thought if Sherlock would be amenable to condoms. Truth is, the thought hasn’t crossed his own mind, and it should have.

Yes, he thinks, yes I am. That’s exactly what I am. Safe.

He clears his throat. “You should go home. You look like you could use a shower. And dry cleaners.”

Sherlock looks at him, and frowns, like he’s not comprehending, like he expected John to say something completely different; it feels alien, and John feels the sharp dissonance of it like something scraping his teeth. Then Sherlock glances down at his coat, like he hasn’t noticed the dust and the dirt before. An expression of faint discontent passes over his face, then fades. He looks at John again.

“I’m fine.”

“So am I,” says John. “They’ll keep me in for observation, scan my head, give me fluids. I’ll be home in twenty four hours.”

Sherlock looks away again, and doesn’t say anything. John lies back on the pillows and closes his eyes.

“Try not to set anything on fire, would you?”

He falls asleep again before he can hear a reply.

*

He comes home after forty-eight hours. There were tests that needed to be run, he’d lost four pints of blood, and the vomiting wasn’t making anyone happy. He didn’t have any more bouts after the first one, and they let him go – good thing, that; one more day in there and he’d be climbing the walls.

Sherlock isn’t in when he gets home. Mrs Hudson frets, makes him tea, brings a plate of assorted biscuits, and shoos him off to bed. He climbs upstairs like he’s a hundred years old, changes into his own fresh t-shirt and shorts (Mrs Hudson did the laundry; she finds things to do when she’s upset, and she hates hospitals), and he falls into the cool sheets like falling into a fresh snowbank. He’s asleep within minutes.

*

When he wakes up, it’s dark outside, the door to the stairwell is open, and Sherlock is sitting on the floor by the doorframe, dressed in his nightclothes, reading a book.

John swallows, rubs at his eyes.

“Time is it.” His voice comes out scratchy. He needs water.

Sherlock looks up. “Four AM.”

John squints at the clock on the nightstand. It’s facing away from the room, where Sherlock can’t see it. The blurry red numbers resolve themselves into 4:03.

He sits up, swings his legs out of bed. Waits for the nausea. It doesn’t come. Good. Very good. He’ll be up and about in no time. He stands, feels the stitches in his side stretch and ache, and his body curls around the sensation. He needs to numb this before he can sleep again. And he needs water. He gets out of bed, pads around Sherlock’s feet, and carefully walks downstairs.

He doesn’t turn on the light in the kitchen (streetlights come through, and he has excellent night vision). He drinks water from the tap and stands there for a while, leaning against the sink and craning his neck. His sleep pattern will be shot to hell for a few days, and he needs to find something to do. No work, no internet, no TV. Even reading a book might be too much of a strain.

He feels Sherlock’s presence behind him, an insistent pull on his senses. God, now it’s John’s turn to be cooped up at the flat, deprived of stimulus and action. He can’t even write up the kidnapping case—

The kidnapping case.

_Jesus Christ._

He turns round. Sherlock is standing by the kitchen table, book in hand. John can see his white fingers in the dark.

“Did we save the kid?” says John.

Sherlock looks at him.

“Yes,” he says, after a while. John nods, and doesn’t say anything. He waits.

“We saved his life,” says Sherlock.

John rolls his hands into fists. Releases them. Takes a breath.

“Was it the first victim?” he says.

Sherlock frowns. His face is a sliver of pale above the grey of his t-shirt.

“The kidnapper,” says John. “Was he the first victim, all grown up?”

Sherlock sets the book on the table. “Obviously.”

“When did you work it out?”

Sherlock looks away and doesn’t reply.

John doesn’t remember the eleven hours. He got some back, in bits and pieces, from the hospital staff, and from looking at the knife wound in his side, stitched up and hurting like fuck. He’s been floating on painkillers, balancing the concussion and the ability to move. He needs to get more painkillers now. He’s got a prescription, but they’re hardly enough.

“Sherlock—”

“Sleep in my bed.”

John blinks. He isn’t sure he heard that correctly at first – Sherlock’s voice is so quiet – but then he processes, and he’s sure, and he can’t help it: he gets angry. It’s white hot, crash and burn, and just like that, he’s furious. A shiver turns his gut inside out, and he has to still his shaking hands.

“What?” he grits out.

Sherlock looks at him. His skin is white, ashen in the light filtering through the kitchen window.

“Sleep in my bed, John.”

It doesn’t sound like a question. It doesn’t even sound like a request. It sounds just so bloody typical Sherlock.

“Why would I do that?” says John, very, very carefully, but his tone must have filtered through, because Sherlock frowns, at last. Yes, John thinks viciously, turn on that big brain of yours. _Think._

“Oh, for God’s sake.” Sherlock sets his jaw, then faces away. “You are recovering from a traumatic brain injury _and_ a stab wound. You are weak, you can’t handle bright lights, and you are at risk of pulling your stitches every time you get out of bed. Honestly, John, you can’t expect me to climb the stairs every time you might need assistance. I will sleep on the sofa. Also.” He gestures towards the bedroom. “I’ve left some sleep aids for you. On the nightstand. If you want them.”

John exhales. Painkillers. Sherlock dug out his secret stash and got him better painkillers. John doesn’t know what they are, but he can see in Sherlock’s body language that they’re not strictly legal.

He clears his throat. Pushes the tendrils of anger back down where they came from. “Sorry. Fine, sorry. I’m just—we agreed.”

“Yes,” says Sherlock. “I remember.” He snatches the book from the table and goes to the sitting room. There’s a click, and then the soft glow of the corner lamp brings details into focus.

John stands in the kitchen for a while, waiting for his pulse to get back under control. He can’t see Sherlock on the other side of the glass partition, but there’s a rustling, and the sound of creaking springs. Sherlock has settled down to read.

After a while, when John forgets how long he’s been standing there, Sherlock’s voice drifts in, soft and low.

“Go back to sleep, John.”

John takes a breath through his nose, huffs it out. Then he turns round and crosses the kitchen and the darkened hallway, and opens the door.

Sherlock’s bedroom is lit by the single lamp on the nightstand. His bed is made with military precision. The sheets are clean, unslept-in, and Sherlock’s second best dressing gown is laid out across the footboard. There’s a glass of water next to the lamp, and next to the glass, three vials of varying sizes hold three types of little white pills.

John sits on the bed, and peers at the labels on the vials. Prescription, at some point, but not necessarily in this country. Certainly more than enough for his needs.

It feels like a trap, closing in, but he finds himself too tired to contemplate it right now. He takes the smallest dose he can afford, drinks the water, digs into the sheets and turns out the light.

*

He takes it easy for a week and a half, even though he gets antsy by day five. He sleeps in Sherlock’s bedroom, gets used to the wide bed. Spends hours staring at the periodic table, contemplating the symbols until he falls asleep. During the day, he selfishly lets Mrs Hudson make all his meals, barely helps sort the shopping into appropriate places. He takes a break from the telly – it’s refreshing, not living in constant awareness of the news.

Sherlock, for the most part, doesn’t disturb him. A new microscope appears at the flat, and a set of new beakers. A new fluorescent appears over the kitchen table, and how John slept through the inescapable cursing that accompanied the installation, he isn’t sure. But it’s on, now, and Sherlock can experiment in proper lighting.

On Wednesday, Sherlock cleans the Buckingham Palace ashtray and sets it, empty, on the mantelpiece.

He stops speaking the day after that.

For the first day and a half, John doesn’t notice. The silence in the flat is always loud when Sherlock hibernates on the sofa and contemplates life, the universe, and everything. This time the silence is subdued – Sherlock checks on at least five ongoing experiments a few times a day, plays a little violin in the evenings, and scrolls through pages and pages of small text on his laptop. He doesn’t change out of his nightclothes, doesn’t bother to wear socks. But he eats, and drinks tea when John makes it, so John, for the most part, doesn’t disturb him either.

Greg comes over on Tuesday, breathless and clearly running on not enough hours of sleep. He takes in the state of the kitchen, Sherlock in pyjamas and goggles over a smouldering pan, John in pyjamas in the chair by the fireplace.

“Fancy a trip to a club, guys?”

John blinks up from his toast. It’s early morning – Greg never calls on them in the morning unless it’s something interesting.

Either that or he got tired of John dodging his questions about Sherlock’s well-being. John folds his paper.

“What kind of club?”

“A night club. Music, alcohol, questionable activities of the general populace. You know, the usual.”

“It’s eight in the morning.”

“It’s never too early for a good murder,” says Sherlock from the kitchen. “Especially if no one saw it, in a room full of strangers.”

John looks at him. This is the first time Sherlock has opened his mouth in six days. Six days is a long silent spell, even for Sherlock – Irene Adler got only four before Sherlock snapped at Mrs Hudson about the heating being on too low.

He regards Sherlock for a moment. Sherlock is in his standard in-home attire, and his feet are bare (John has consciously stopped thinking about Sherlock’s bare feet; he has made the effort to sever the live wire from his brain to his groin; they’re just feet, there is nothing remarkable about feet). Sherlock’s hair is in that artful morning disarray that only comes from spending carefully strategized minutes in the bathroom.

He looks completely normal. Greg didn’t spare him a second glance after he first came in, didn’t look at John with a question in his eyes. John was waiting for that conversation, but now he knows it isn’t coming.

Because they’re back to normal. And this is what they do.

“I’ll ask you later how you know that.” Greg grins at them from the doorway. “But I’m in a little bit of a hurry, now. Are you coming?”

Sherlock tugs off his gloves and sets the goggles on the table. “What’s the address?”

*

The night club has the obligatory reinforced door and an intricate mark over the entryway. Inside, the bar is unmanned, the dance floor is empty, and what is undoubtedly a cosy interior in the right lighting, in the glare the fluorescents has become a claustrophobic dungeon. The Yarders are on the scene, taking pictures, bagging and tagging. Greg stands to the side, looking down at the body on the floor.

“Gang violence?” says John, coming to stand next to him. Sherlock is already crouching by the body.

“Looks like it,” says Greg. “Point-blank, in the back of the head. Room full of people, but no witnesses, no security tapes, no nothing. Professional job.”

“Except there are no turf wars over this area.” Martha comes up from the side. John startles, but he hides it in a wide grin – too wide; Sherlock would know in an instant. “This is a well-established no man’s land. No reason for anyone to conduct their business here, especially not like this.”

She smiles back at John, and in her smile there is a conversation, separate from what’s coming out of her mouth. John finds himself brightening with interest, against his better judgement.

“Also,” Greg motions with his chin. “This is the bartender.”

“And the bartender never gets killed.” Martha’s grin is bright like diamonds, and aimed straight at him, and John relaxes, and grins right back, because there is a conversation there, oh yes, and it’s a conversation John quite enjoys having, and he has no reason to stop – he is back to normal, and this is what he does, and nobody can tell him that he’s not allowed.

When Sherlock stopped speaking, John spent two more days sleeping downstairs, and then he gathered his things, set the remaining painkillers on the kitchen sink, and moved back to his own bedroom. In the intimate silence, he stared at nothing while he brought himself off with precision. Thought of nothing. Did not listen to the sounds in the vents.

He finds he quite enjoys having a conversation with Martha where no words are exchanged, and yet both parties know exactly where this is heading. Silver platter, right there, and it’s so easy – he’s missed this being so easy. He thinks he will ask that they go to her place, this time. They will have to watch out for his injury, but he’s fairly sure Martha will find a way to entertain herself with John on his back.

“Lestrade,” calls Sherlock, and Greg detaches himself from where he’s been leaning against the bar. They crouch next to the body together, and for all of three seconds John contemplates if he should feel left out, but then he blinks and decides that it’s pointless.

“Pints later tonight?”

He looks over. Martha’s smile really is dazzling. Gorgeous, head to toe. John loves beautiful women.

“Ah,” he says, with a small smile. “You see, I got hit in the head. Problems with hearing. Did you say your place?”

She snorts. Even that is gorgeous.

“I don’t know about that.” She purses her lips. “I’d have to get rid of my flatmate.”

John’s smile falters, but then Martha leans in (leans down, just a bit, and John does so enjoy taller people), and she whispers in his ear, rasp and all, “Oh, wait, I don’t _have_ one.” 

She straightens, and John smiles again, and briefly turns his head, just to snap the tension before it makes him too warm, this is really not the right place for—

His eyes meet Sherlock’s – for a moment, for the briefest of seconds, for the tiniest of time slices before Sherlock looks back down at the body – but that moment is enough, because John is not concussed anymore, and he has eyes, and a functioning brain, and he can conduct light like it’s nobody’s business, and he can see it, plain as day, and with a level of clarity that has escaped him for weeks.

There are things you can’t sham, body language you cannot fabricate. Sherlock shams with the best of them, from crocodile tears to a shattered skull and blood on the pavement. But this, this is real, as real as it can be, and John knows it, he is certain, because he has seen this, in the mirror, for months. 

Sherlock’s face, before he hides it in the collar of his dramatic coat, in the loop of his artistic scarf, is a picture of raw, unfiltered despair.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Spot the Reference: Elementary.


	14. Footnotes

It happens in a haze, after that. John will later confess that he doesn’t remember much of it – maybe it was the concussion after all, maybe it was the strain of suddenly getting out of the flat after resting for days. Sherlock will have theories, and John will even be fond of some of them. It’s all immaterial, anyway.

*

He lets everything else fade into white noise. He walks around Martha – says something to her, something on autopilot, like ‘Sorry, have to go’ or ‘Need to take care of something’, because she deserves that much – and he walks over to where Sherlock and Greg are crouching over the dead body. Sherlock is pointing out a bruise on the neck, and Greg is nodding and not getting a word in edgewise. John walks over to them and stands very close to Sherlock, very close to the hem of his dramatic coat, splayed behind him on the floor.

“Sherlock,” he says, and Sherlock doesn’t look up.

“Sherlock, we have to go,” he says, because it’s impersonal enough that Greg can misconstrue it any which way he likes.

Sherlock doesn’t look up. He has stopped speaking, and John knows that every molecule of his body is now aware of John, and what John is telling him in a conversation that they’re not having aloud.

“I’ll go get a cab,” says John, and then he turns on his heel, and walks out of the dungeon.

He stands on the curb, with his back turned to the door. The morning is chilly and bright, and John blinks up at the sun hanging low over the buildings, looks up at the gathering clouds. There is rain, coming. There’s a weight on his chest, lifting, inch by slow-moving inch.

_I didn’t want you to find out like this._

He thinks about his list. Block handwriting, proper formatting and all. Ways of committing suicide, clear and ordered, on the scale of one to what would amuse Sherlock the most.

_I will do whatever you want._

He thinks about the details of war. About Sherlock with a burning cigarette at the open window. About Sherlock putting the cigarette to the unbroken skin of his wrist and not making a sound.

_I think about that every day._

Sherlock in his head says all the right things, over and over, but the man behind the curtain pulls the threads on the marionette and makes it dance, a caricature of his own devising.

The man behind the curtain is dead, and the marionette doesn’t dance anymore, and John used to be very loyal, very quickly, because his instincts had never steered him wrong – until the day that they did.

Is it really a surprise that he stopped trusting his instincts?

He hears steps behind him, so he raises his hand and hails down a taxi.

*

They don’t speak on the way home. Sherlock looks out of the window. It’s begun to rain now, thin rivulets streaking sideways against the glass. Sherlock taps his gloved fingers on his lip, his chin, his lip again. The nervous jitter of his leg is setting John on edge, so John reaches out, and lays one hand flat on Sherlock’s knee. Sherlock stills.

John leaves his hand where it is. He doesn’t move it, either way, so when they arrive at Baker Street, it’s only natural to transfer it from Sherlock’s knee to the small of his back, when Sherlock climbs out of the cab.

He lets go, after that, and they get out and into the rain. Sherlock fishes out his keys and tries two times before he unlocks the front door.

Cross the hallway, up the seventeen steps, and John lets Sherlock’s presence pull him behind like a homing beacon. Landing, doorway, sitting room, and John takes a moment to get his breath, and then he turns round and slams the door closed with Sherlock’s back. 

Sherlock, crowded, yields without protest, and John so likes taller people, because he grabs the end of the artistic scarf, and pulls down, and Sherlock goes, folds like paper around John’s body, and John puts his mouth to Sherlock’s neck, and breathes in.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m so sorry.” He holds the scarf tighter. “I’m an idiot. God, I’m such an idiot.”

Sherlock doesn’t say anything. His hand comes up, a light touch against John’s side, an inch or two shy of where John still isn’t done healing. It hurts a little, but John doesn’t pull away. He opens his mouth against Sherlock’s throat instead, and bites him there, tender and slow, and Sherlock makes a sound, an expulsion of breath, and his fingers dig in—

White hot _blinding pain_ , and John chokes, pulls away—

Sherlock’s other hand grasps the back of his neck, and then Sherlock is leaning down and kissing him, bared teeth, no finesse, sharp and hard and shockingly clumsy.

John groans into his mouth. The live wire from his brain to his groin lights up like a charge, like fireworks, like lightning, and the searing pain in his side burns and melts into it like honey. It hurts, and it doesn’t, and the overload on mixed signals has never felt so good.

Jesus, he thinks. Jesus. I will never get enough of this.

They break apart. Sherlock looks at him, chest heaving. He is very, very pale. His scarf is hanging open, the top button of his shirt is undone, and his eyes are transparent, dark, pupils blown wide. He peels his hand off of John’s neck and blinks, like it takes effort to focus. 

“Do you—” He licks his lips. “Do you need to beat me?”

John swallows. White noise hums and crackles in his brain. It’s hard to tell question from request. He lifts his hand, touches Sherlock’s face, runs his fingers down one sharp cheekbone. Sherlock’s eyelids flutter, but he doesn’t look away. He is very, very pale, but his skin is warm. Not stone, not marble.

“No,” says John. He slides his thumb over Sherlock’s mouth, and Sherlock closes his eyes and leans into the touch.

“What if I want you to?” Sherlock’s lips are soft, moving against John’s skin, so John parts them, pushes inside, slides the pad of his thumb over Sherlock’s teeth. 

“Then I will,” he says. “Later. I will do whatever you need, later.”

Sherlock hums. The sound reverberates in John’s chest. “And now?”

John pulls out his thumb, and runs it, wet, across Sherlock’s cheek, and then he slides his hand up, over Sherlock’s forehead and into his fringe. He pulls, and Sherlock’s eyes fly open, and it’s almost too much, the longing in there, the desire, the yearning for the loss of control. John delights in it, and he knows Sherlock does too. This is what they are, now.

“Now,” says John. “Now take off your coat and sit in your chair.”

*

They do it slowly, but without pause, because John doesn’t want to give Sherlock time to think. Sherlock uses his body like a precision tool; he seduces like it’s a mathematical equation. John doesn’t want any of that, not now, not today. Not ever again.

“Plant your feet.”

He took off Sherlock’s shoes and socks, pulled down his trousers and pants and tossed them aside. He ran his fingers along the tendons of Sherlock’s feet, over the bones of his ankles. Sherlock flexed his toes, then settled, then curled them when John moved up to touch the backs of his knees. He flexes his toes again, now, and then plants his feet as requested. John leans in, puts his mouth to the inside of Sherlock’s thigh, and inhales. He is kneeling on the rug, and he knows he’s going to pay for this, later, but he ignores it – these are the rare pleasures in life, these transformations from friend and subject to lover; the first taste of skin, the first sharp intake of breath. He shifts closer.

Sherlock keens when John takes him in, and wrenches his head to the side, fingers digging into the armrests. His eyes are closed, and John discovers, to his great delight, that Sherlock in pleasure sounds not unlike Sherlock in pain.

John spits, and spits a lot, and does with his mouth and hands what he’s been meaning to do ever since that nightclub in Soho, ever since the failed experiment in reading clues in a cauldron of obvious. 

Sherlock’s clues are completely fucked up. It’s because he doesn’t have a good baseline. Crime is a trade for individuals who deviate from the norm – you can read them all you like, emulate them all you like, but baselining from a non-representative sample leads to biased results – and Sherlock has been dealing with crime ever since his formative years.

“Ah, God,” says Sherlock. His hand flies to his mouth, and he bites his knuckles.

John pulls off. Sherlock turns wild eyes to him.

“Don’t stop. John, don’t—Please, just—”

“Hands down,” says John.

Sherlock throws his head back and _growls_. His thighs flex under John’s fingers, but he returns his hand to the armrest.

“Good,” says John. “Very good.”

It doesn’t take long, after that. Sherlock shakes and tries to hold still, and then tenses and spasms, and fights the coiling of his body, trying to heed John’s words to the letter. He doesn’t completely succeed. John can forgive that, though – John can forgive _anything_ , now – so when Sherlock’s hips twitch and push, up and in, that beautiful loss of control taking away John’s air, that salty rush flooding his mouth – John relaxes, leans in, and rides it out into submission.

*

He makes a detour to the kitchen, after, to wash out his mouth and grab a can of industrial grade petroleum jelly off the countertop. Sherlock, still in his armchair, watches him through half-closed eyelids, and when John comes up to kneel on the floor again, Sherlock breathes out, shifts on the seat, and lets his legs fall open.

It’s not a good position. The floor is hard against John’s knees, and the curve of Sherlock’s spine is uncomfortable to even look at, but the height of it is perfect. John slips his slick hand between Sherlock’s body and the leather seat, lays his other hand on Sherlock’s stomach. Sherlock’s eyes are closed now, and his hands lay relaxed over the armrests, but his thighs are trembling, and his belly quivers under John’s touch. John pulls up the dress shirt, and drags his nails lightly over the soft skin of Sherlock's stomach.

Sherlock draws in a sharp breath, but he doesn’t open his eyes. Not enough, then. John lets the shirt fall back down. His other hand is now slipping and sliding, back and forth over soft tissue, fingers seeking, but not pushing in yet. He leans over, finds Sherlock’s left nipple through the fabric with his mouth, and he bites it.

Sherlock makes a sound, soft and shocked, his body tensing in different ways, and John exerts soft pressure with clinical precision, and slides two fingers in.

“Oh,” says Sherlock. And then, “Oh, that’s—” And then he blinks, and frowns, and says, “No, no, not like this.”

John twists his hand, and scissors his fingers, stretching the hard muscle. Sherlock shudders, and his hand comes up to grasp John’s arm.

“No,” he says. “Don’t prepare me.”

“What?” John blinks. He keeps his hand where it is. Sherlock is warm inside, but tight and tense like a coiled spring. “Don’t be an idiot. You know how this works.”

“Yes.” Sherlock nods. “Yes, I know. And I don’t want you to prepare me. Just— Please. John.”

John draws out his fingers, and braces his slick hand against Sherlock’s thigh. The low thrum of desire that’s been running through his body ever since they came through the door stutters and begins to taper off.

“Sherlock,” John says. “Look at me.”

Sherlock blinks up. His eyes are unfocussed, out of sync with the rest of his body. John lifts his dry hand to Sherlock’s cheek, looks him straight in the eye.

“I told you, this is not about getting even. You don’t have to let me—you don’t have to let me do any of this. If you think that I want— If you think that I still want to hurt you—I don’t. Just. Forget last year, yes? It’s already forgotten. Please. Let me do this right.”

Sherlock looks at him for a moment, frowning, like John is not making sense, and then he rolls his eyes.

“Oh, for the love of _God_.”

And that’s all the warning John is going to get.

John knows a variety of ways to incapacitate a man in any position, and quite a few of defending himself from a surprise attack, so his body reacts before he has time to think – still, it’s not quite enough. Split second, the potential energy of Sherlock’s wiry muscles transforming into kinetics and speed, and the world tilts, the room spins, and the next thing John knows, they’re both on the floor, Sherlock on his back, and John splayed on top of his chest, facing up, spine arched, head locked in a perfect chokehold. Sherlock’s legs are hooked over John’s knees, keeping him steady, and John estimates he has eight seconds before he blacks out.

Underneath him, Sherlock exhales a ragged breath. His arms are steel around John’s neck.

“Do you see?” growls Sherlock.

John can barely see, but he slams his free hand on the floor two times, and Sherlock lets up, but only a fraction. John drags in air.

Sleeper’s hold, very efficient. Also known as the RNC, which is apt, given that Sherlock is doing this half-naked.

“John.” Sherlock tightens his arm. “Do you _see_?”

Ah. That was not a rhetorical question. 

“Yes,” John wheezes out. “Yes. Let me go.”

Sherlock lets him go. John rolls off him, and away, coughing and catching his breath. He rolls over to lie on his back, and blinks, astonished, at the ceiling. After a while, the hum of the rain outside filters through, the real world coming back from the edge of a blackout.

“Bloody hell,” he says, when he’s got his breath under control. He coughs a little more, and looks over at Sherlock.

Sherlock is watching him. He has scooted back to lean against his chair, crossed his feet and clasped his hands on his stomach. Perfectly harmless, clinically efficient killing machine. He looks completely relaxed, despite wearing only a singular, not even fully buttoned item of clothing. Clearly, propriety and Sherlock Holmes live in separate dimensions today.

They look at each other for a little while. Then John sits up and runs his hand over his face.

“Fine,” he says. “Fine. You made your point.”

“Did I.” Sherlock’s voice is unnaturally calm, with a faint hint of knives. 

“Yes.”

“Are you sure? Because you seem to think you need to be gentle with me. You seem to think that I say one thing and I mean another. You have done nothing but second-guess yourself every second of every time we do this, while I’ve been telling you from the start that this is what I _want_ , this is what I _need_ , and you are perfect for this, John, do you see? You are _perfect_.”

Sherlock’s hair is falling into his eyes, it’s grown long enough now. He runs his hand through it.

“I didn’t die, John. I didn’t have a lobotomy. I’ve just been _away_.”

“I know,” says John. “I understand.”

Sherlock shakes his head. “No, I don’t think you do. I don’t think you ever will. God, this is _pointless_. I’m the only one who thinks like me, and there is nothing that will make up for— Nothing that I can say—”

He stutters, and stops, and bites his lip. His flexes his fingers in his lap, and John can’t help but look, can’t help but take him in, _drink_ him in, half-naked, and destroyed, and _his_.

“Sherlock.” He rolls over, and crawls, on all fours, over to Sherlock, kneels in front of him, and takes Sherlock’s face in both hands. “I understand.”

Their second kiss is less clumsy, because John is dealing it this time, and John has dealt thousands of kisses. Sherlock opens his mouth to him, slowly, and closes his eyes, and John drinks in the taste of him, the salt of his sweat, the trembling tension of his inexperience. It’s intoxicating, that Sherlock would be _not perfect_ like this, and yet exactly what John wants, exactly what he needs.

John pulls away. “Take off your shirt and give it to me.”

He ties Sherlock’s hands behind his back with the sleeves of his dress shirt, and makes him kneel and bend over the seat of his leather chair. Sherlock is trembling, tense like he’s about to break, and by the time John has opened his own trousers, drawn himself out and stroked himself to hardness against the backs of Sherlock’s thighs, Sherlock’s breath is coming out of him in ragged gasps. It’s madness. It’s like music. Outside, it’s still raining, a steady thrum of a December downpour, and inside, John braces himself with one hand on Sherlock’s bound hands, and pushes in, into tight heat, into fireworks, into bright Technicolor. Sherlock cries out against the leather seat, and then is silent.

John curls his hips, threads his other hand through Sherlock’s hair, and leans over his back.

“Does it hurt?” His lips brush the top of Sherlock’s spine.

Sherlock breathes out, but he doesn’t say anything, because he’s not making this easy. John smiles, pulls out a fraction, then pushes in, hard, pressing Sherlock’s hips into the leather. Sherlock makes a noise that’s an absence of noise, like he hasn’t enough air in his lungs.

“Yes,” Sherlock says, on a sharp inhale. John can see his lower lip, curled under his teeth. “Yes, _please_.”

*

After, John cleans himself up, tucks himself in, and sits on the floor to stretch out his legs. He leans against Sherlock, who has disentangled himself from the shirt and relocated to sit, still naked, in the armchair. Sherlock’s fingers slide over John’s head, gently stroking. John smiles, leans his face against Sherlock’s bony shin.

He is content. He is calm. There are parts of his body that hurt, but it’s a good kind of hurt; he has earned it.

The image in his head, of crushed skull and blood on the pavement, slowly filters through. John takes it, turns it over in his hands. Notes the details. Then he lets it go.

Sherlock’s fingers are warm against his skin.

“In Lisbon,” says Sherlock, after a while. “There was an assassin.” He pauses, like he has to gather enough content to form the next sentence. “Interpol top ten. I tracked him through a shipment number from Germany.”

John breathes in, and out. His own senses are subdued, his mouth tired, his desire temporarily sated. Outside, it’s still raining. Sherlock’s voice is very quiet.

“I caught him,” says Sherlock. “Or rather, he tried to catch me. We fought, a bit. A ricochet hit me in the arm, and another hit him in the leg. Femoral artery. Very unlucky. He bled out in three minutes.”

John closes his eyes. He can see the dust in the air, hear the echo of pulled triggers. Gasps of a dying man. And Sherlock, eyes wide open, on the dirty floor. Waiting.

“I went to my hotel room, after. Dug out the bullet. Messy business, that. Which you know. I needed—I needed… anaesthetic.”

John breathes out, thinks about the fresh scarring above Sherlock’s left elbow. Sherlock’s fingers have stopped scratching at his skin. His hand is lying against the back of John’s neck now, warm and solid.

“I thought of home,” says Sherlock, slowly. “Of—of this. I thought of this. I got high and I thought of this. I thought of you putting your gun in me, took me three seconds to come, it made no sense.”

John squeezes his eyes shut. He can’t help it, he can’t stop. He can see, in his mind’s eye, the exact picture Sherlock wants him to see – the gun oil, the muzzle, the front sight catching on soft flesh. And it shouldn’t affect him like this, that sharp zing of pleasure, that sickening clench of need in his gut. It really shouldn’t. He should be better than this.

He clears his throat. “You curl your toes when you come.” His voice comes out scratchy.

Sherlock snorts; a soft, surprised sound. Then he sighs and his fingers resume stroking along John’s nape.

“You’ve been looking.” John can hear the smile in his voice. He lifts his head, looks up along Sherlock’s body – pale skin, legs wide open, narrow hips, flat chest, head tilted back, dark curls in a tangle – and Sherlock is indeed smiling, eyes closed, completely unfazed by the degree of his nakedness, by the state of his debauchment.

He is a sight. John wants to come home to this, John wants to _make_ this; he wants, with every fibre of his being, to _make this happen_ , every day.

“I like—” John says, and clears his throat. “I like looking at you.”

Sherlock doesn’t reply.

They stay like that for a little while. John doesn’t really care for the passage of time. He’s cleaned up, he’s comfortable on the floor, but Sherlock is—well.

“Aren’t you cold?” says John.

Sherlock doesn’t say anything.

“Sherlock.”

“Hm?”

John smiles. “Aren’t you cold? You’ve been sitting there, you know. Like this.”

“Mmm, no, I’m fine.” His fingers twitch, and stroke along John’s nape once again. John leans into the touch, and closes his eyes.

“John?”

He blinks his eyes open. He drifted off, this time. “Yes?”

Sherlock stays quiet for a moment longer. His hand is warm, unmoving against the back of John’s neck.

“I will—misbehave,” he says at last. He sounds like he is warning John about the possibility of poisonous snakes. “Possibly a lot. What we’ve been doing. I find that… engaging. A good use of my time. So I will initiate things. If you’d rather I didn’t—You need to tell me right now.”

John thinks about it, about Sherlock _initiating_ things. Things John hasn’t tried. Things he hasn’t tried in a while. A kaleidoscope of possibilities unfurls in front of his eyes. The box in his brain rattles its hinges.

He lifts his hand to his nape, closes it around Sherlock’s hand. Traces his fingertips with his own. Sherlock’s elegant fucking fingers. John loves them. He loves every bit of him, every infuriating inch.

“It’s fine,” he says. “We are fine.”

\- THE END -

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you everyone for coming on this journey with me. Your feedback has been generous and insightful! Do share with me what you thought about the conclusion of this story. Thank you so much!


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